WordPress on Google Cloud Platform. For free.

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Almost all Cloud computing platforms have a free tier with different value propositions to different users. I have looked at Azure and AWS โ€“ which were unclear what comes for free but are useful for me professionally to see what can be possible โ€“ and then found OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) and (GCP) Google Cloud Platform.

These latter offerings really seem to give some limited compute power to free tier users.

I have OCI VMs running Oracle Linux 8, a RH-derived linux platform, one of which is an OpenVPN-AS server โ€“ so effectively offering me a VPN.  Speeds are not blistering but OK; there is an ease of how you can access these using Putty and RSA keys plus itโ€™s reasonably secure.  Add Tailscale to the mix and you can close out public Internet from your admin interfaces and layer in more security.

As a comparison, I looked at GCPโ€™s free tier.  Letโ€™s cut to the chase โ€“ the free tier there is generous and really free if you follow the instructions.  e2-micro VMs in certain locations get you a month of CPU time and, as Iโ€™ve found, offer a faster OpenVPN-AS than OCI and the marketplace allows you to install a WordPress instance on an e2-micro VM.

Setting up the WordPress on the new VM is easy enough; add to it some Certbot from Letโ€™s Encrypt and you have a HTTPS website in a few minutes.

If youโ€™re here reading this post, youโ€™re reading it on my GCP VM.  Naturally, I have the skills to reduce the attack surface on my WordPress; my admin account is an obscure, random user with an obscure, randomly-generated password.  I donโ€™t know either of them!  Add to that the use of Wordfence โ€“ even the free layer offers great benefits โ€“ and you have a secure, disposable website.  I am sold on it as the Apps for GCP are good too (along with Azure); OCI Apps are more phone-centric which means they are OK for monitoring availability but not so good for productivity.

So my recommendation is compute free, compute in the Cloud and leverage whatโ€™s out there.