Getting up and running with WordPress these days has never been easier until you need high performance. When every micro-second counts toward the bottom line, it may be too late when you realize your host can’t keep up with the success of “Some Awesome App” or “The Greatest New Website” etc…
This has lead to countless migrations hence the popularity of migration plugins, over 31 pages to be exact. So what is a good solution to this problem?
Enter the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace Deployments!
A few reasons why you would want to go this route from the start that I have found to be totally awesome are the following:
- Backed by Google Cloud Platform
- Free tier after 12 months for small sites
- Super easy migrations for traffic growth
- Headless options on App Engine or Kubernetes
- Google plugins to integrate GCP products
- Documentation and Customer Service
The main point is you can scale multiple deployments based on traffic or usage and either maintain through a deployment plan (cloud functions) or just simply point to a central DB in Cloud SQL, but that is for another day.
Today we focus on starting by making the right choice for small projects that will lead to big things.
To get started sign up using a gmail account and get 12 months free of $300 worth of GCP service. Once you are all set go back to the console marketplace and get ready for launch!
Now that you are all signed up you can go back to the WordPress deployment page here. You will want to select the top choice “WordPress Single Instance using GCP Marketplace”.
Hold on!! This is not the package I would use, feel free to use it but I would recommend the Bitnami WordPress packages. In the search bar type “Bitnami WordPress” and hit enter.
You will be presented with 4 deployment packages, choose wisely young grasshopper. We are sticking to “WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic” because most will only need a single instance running on a LAMP stack with SSL. But I’ve used all of them and only the multi-site took a bit of OH YEAH to understand how it was set up out the box. Check out http://xip.io/ if staying on a IP address for multisite. Moving on…
Click Launch.
Now update your selections as follows by the red arrows. Again this is for a development environment example, if you need to build a real instance choose accordingly but understand the cost involved.
With the current selection you get an estimated monthly bill of around $5.13. Now remember that $300 promo? This is where the first 12 months comes in free.
Now scroll down and hit Deploy… When finished you will be redirected to your new deployment.
Congratulations on your 1st GCP WordPress deployment!
Now take some time and explore all the access and TODO’s of the new install. The documentation section is great and setting up access from your local computer is just a few steps we will cover another day.
You can also get a domain name pointed to your new instance using Google Domains makes it super easy too!
