I wrote a post recently about moving my hosting to Google Cloud products. On eof the things that I noticed when folks were checking out the move was that they couldn’t figure out what it was going to cost them. I figured I’d try to help out just a little bit and throw up my costs for one week. You can math from there!
Costs vary based on a bunch of variables, of course. Google literally charges you for what you use. You pick your machines, memory, services, etc. You are in charge of every little detail. That actually makes it a good deal harder to work with if you, like me, know very little about the technology or services or being a system admin, etc. You will have to do some research, it’s that simple. Again, check out that post I linked above for a description of my setup. You may need more or less machine than I do, but it appears I nailed the setup for what I need. I get great performance, I”m not on shared hosting, and the performance is well balanced with the cost.
I run a small machine for my main server – there is a smaller option that would probably save you $10 a month, you need to have very little happening for the micro instance to work for you. A WordPress site with just about any traffic will choke. Like I mentioned in my previous post, you do get 2 months free to setup and test, you can change your machines on the fly… so if you go micro and it doesn’t work, you can bump it up and keep bumping until you get what you need.
You server costs are literally just that, only the server. You also need persistent storage. I set mine up on 75GB which is actually too much, be careful here, you pay by what you setup – you can grow your server but you can’t shrink it at this time. I’d like to shrink mine to about 25GB… I’ve tried various ways of cloning and building new machines, but I haven’t figured that out yet.
Persistent storage is your server’s storage – holding the file system. It costs more than other storage options. I host a lot of DJ mixes which don’t need to have high response time, etc. So, as I described in my previous post, I set up Google Storage buckets for this. I recommend this option for any of your media. In a wordpress install, I’d bet you could dump your entire uploads directory into a bucket.
Now, I also use Google’s Cloud SQL. You don’t need to and it costs money. I did find that by using Cloud SQL rather than mySQL on server, I was able to increase performance. Google gives you notifications on your machine, and I was exceeding my server’s capabilities daily. Bumping up to the next size server would have cost me maybe $20 a month. Instead I moved to Cloud SQL, got rid of the performance issues, and onlu added maybe $5 a month. Cloud SQL requires another machine and another disk. I used a micro for this one and an SSD persistent disk (my server uses a standard HDD, but I wanted higher performance from SQL).
The final purchase I make through Google is Snapshots. These are the way you backup your server. You can make full Snapshots and incrementals which just cover the changes since the previous Snapshot. These can be automated, I handle them manually. I have 1 full and 4 incrementals right now and it probably doesn’t add $1 a month.
Final expense, traffic. You pay for data and bandwidth. You pay to move files around, server to buckets, net traffic, downloads, etc. For me, this is pennies.
So there we have my summary of what I use:
- 1 small server instance
- 1 75 GB HDD disk for server
- 1 micro SQL machine
- 1 10 GB SDD disk for SQL
- 1 google bucket regional for DJ mixes
- 1 google bucket multi-regional for customer DJ mixes
- 5 snapshots
- Traffic
My grand total as seen in the picture attached to this post is $6.52 per week. YOur figures could vary wildly from this depending on what you setup and use, but this gives you an idea of what works for a Yourls install and a WordPress Network running 6 sites.
