How to Host a FREE Website on Google Cloud (Step-by-Step)

You can host your own website on Google Cloud for free and I’ll show you how step by step, even if you never worked with cloud servers before. We’ll create a virtual machine on Google Cloud’s always free tier. Install Docker, set up Caddy and get your website live on a custom domain with HTTPS.

Don’t worry about hidden charges. I’ll break down the limits so you can stay completely free. And by the end of the, you’ll have a secure website on a cloud server that you can experiment with and make your own. So, let’s get started.

So Get Yourself Over to Cloud Google Com

Okay, so get yourself over to cloud.google.com. You will need a credit card to sign up. But like I said, don’t worry. I will go over the limits so you can stay within them later on.

But first, let’s go to your Google Cloud Console by clicking this button up here and then this hamburger menu in the upper lefthand corner. Come down to Compute Engine and then Overview. And we’ll get out of here. And then we want to click on this box that says Create Instance.

And now if this is your first time using Google cloud, you’ll probably see something here about enabling the Compute Engine API. So go ahead and do that. And once you’ve done that, we can configure our virtual machine. Now you should be aware that uh there and I’ll have this linked below.

It’s Always Free Every Month to Month

There are these specific parameters, these specific specifications that we need to stay within uh when we configure our virtual machine, so that way it’s always free every month to month. So as you can see here, we have to pick an E2 Micro machine in one of these data centers. So let’s go ahead and start with that. And I’ll just keep this up here so we can reference it throughout the.

Um, for the region, um, US Central 1 in Iowa is one of those. So, I’m just going to keep that. And then as far as the machine type, we need an E2 type machine. And then specifically, we want a e2-micro, which is going to give us uh that two virtual CPUs and 1 gigabyte of memory.

Let’s move on to the OS and storage and click this change button. And a lot of these operating systems are free and open source, so you can choose whichever one you like. Um, I’m going to pick Ubuntu because I prefer that. And we’re going to pick specifically the latest long-term support version, which is Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Because Our Machine Is an Intel Processor

And be careful, uh, because our machine is an Intel processor. We don’t want the ARM version here. We want the x86/64 version. So, let’s click on that.

And then, as you can see, we can get up to 30 GB of SSD storage for free as part of the always free tier. So, we’ll pick that. And we want to make sure that for the boot disc type, we have a standard persistent disc as it says in the specifications. And then we can select that.

Let’s go to data protection next. And we will disable backups just because that they could potentially incur an additional fee. And then under networking, we want to enable HTTP and HTTPS traffic. And I do want to point out down here, I know there’s a lot of confusion.

If You Expand the Network Interface Um

If you expand the network interface, um you might think that if you upgrade your uh network service tier from premium to standard, you’ll get 200 gigabytes of uh bandwidth per month. But that’s actually not the case. This option is only relevant if you have a paid virtual machine through Google Cloud. What we are limited to, as the specs say, is one gigabyte of outgoing traffic per month.

We’ll talk a little bit more about this later. It does seem limiting, but there are ways around this with something like um a CDN or whatnot, but for now, just keep the premium network service tier enabled. Under observability, we disable the install ops agent for monitoring and logging. Again, that could incur a fee.

It is free to enable, but we’re just going to avoid that. And then under security, um, we do not want a service account. And I don’t think there’s anything under advanced that we’re going to enable here. Actually, if you do go down to provisioning model, make sure that you have standard selected as opposed to spot.

Spot Is the Preempted Version and We Need

Spot is the preempted version and we need the non-preemptable VM. So, just make sure you have standard and you should be good to go. Uh, but at that point, we have a monthly estimate that’s around $7.31. Yours might look a little bit different depending on how many days are in the current month that you’re enabling this.

Uh, but like I said, we get two virtual CPUs, 1 GB of memory, 30 GB of solid state storage. And um, I I will put this in the linked blog post just so you guys can be 100% sure that you are enabling a always free tier compatible virtual machine. So, they have this command line equivalent code and I’ll I’ll put what mine looks like and you can compare them side by side. Unfortunately, there’s no way you can paste this in unless you actually do the command line.

But this is what you your configuration needs to look like. And if that is the case, we can go ahead and create our virtual machine. So, go ahead and click on create. And that’ll just take a couple minutes here.

When That Finishes I’ll Catch Back Up

When that finishes, I’ll catch back up with you. All right, our virtual machine is up and running. As you can see here, it says this instance is running. So, let’s connect to it.

And we can do that via SSH. There’s a couple different options. We’re just going to do SSH in a browser window. So, that’ll open up this one.

And you’ll see this popup that says allow SSH in browser to connect to VM. So, click on authorize. And you’ll have to authorize that through your Google account when the first time you do this. So, go ahead and do that.

And Then We’ll Click on Continue

And then we’ll click on continue. And now we are logged into that virtual machine in that remote data center in Iowa in my case. And what we want to do is install Docker. So, we’re going to set up a website via Docker.

And we can install Docker with this command right here. And don’t worry, I’ll have all of these commands linked on my website. Um, so you can just copy and paste from there. So, what that does is download this get-docker.sh script.

And what we want to do is run that. So, we can do a sudo sh get-docker. And if you’re not familiar, you can tab complete to not type out every single letter. And that’s going to go ahead and install Docker and Docker Compose.

All Right That Has Finished

All right, that has finished. So, we have Docker and Docker Compose installed. And uh the last thing I’m going to do is add our user. In my case, Tony, the Tony user, which I think does come from your Google account, the name on your Google account.

But anyway, we want to add that user to the Docker group. So that way, we don’t have to type pseudo every time. So, let’s do that. And now for those changes to take effect, let’s just exit out of our SSH session by typing exit.

And then we can come back in the same way that we did before. So open in a new browser window. And we won’t have to re-authenticate with Google this time. That was just a once and done thing.

And We Are Back on Our SSH Session

And we are back on our SSH session. And what we’re going to do is set up the most basic Caddy website possible. We’re just going to set up a Docker Compose file. So, let’s go make a directory called site.

And we’ll go into that directory. And there’s nothing in here obviously, but let’s make a file in there called docker-compose.yml. And in here, um, let’s again paste this from my website. We are going to define a service.

Uh, we’re going to pull down the Caddy image and we’re going to just call it caddy_demo. There is an underscore there. It’s not really showing up that well. Um but we’re going to expose ports um 80 and 443 which is HTTP and HTTPS.

To Get Out of Here Control X

So to get out of here control X, capital Y, hit enter. And now we can do a docker compose up -d. Dash d is damon mode so it runs in the background. And that’s going to go ahead and pull down that docker container and start it up.

We can confirm that with docker compose ps to see the list of processes. And um as you can see here it is up and running. So now at this point we are technically serving a website over the internet. And let’s test that out.

So let’s minimize this. Uh we have this IP address. The external IP address um that we can go to in a web browser. And the reason this is happening, basically when you click on this link over here it’s taking you to an HTTPS version of your website.

And We Don’t Have That Enabled Yet

And we don’t have that enabled yet. So, let’s make sure we’re explicitly going to http:/// the IP address. When you do that, you should see the default Caddy landing page. So, this is cool and all, but it is uh not secure.

And it doesn’t have a domain name. So, at this point, what we want to do is associate a domain name that we own with this IP address. And if you don’t have a domain name, go ahead and get one. There’s a bunch of different places.

I’ll have something linked below for my recommendation. Um, I have uh my domain names, some of them registered with Netim right now and we’re going to use this one for the demo today, loolanta.org. So, wherever you registered your domain name, go there. Find something regarding the DNS settings or the zone file.

And We Want to Basically Add Uh

And we want to basically add uh DNS records. So, I can do that here by clicking in this button, create a new record. And what we want to do is add an A Record. The target is going to be the IP address of your virtual machine.

So let’s go ahead and copy that and then we’ll go back to your domain name registrar and paste that in. And then we’ll confirm. So now that IP address is associated with my domain name. This next one is optional.

We can add another DNS A Record with the same target, but this time we want it to be from www.loolanta.org to our IP address. So, let’s go ahead and create that one, too. All right, we got both of those. So, let’s go back into our virtual machine.

With Our Website

And the next thing we want to do is tell Caddy we have a domain name associated with our website. So, we can do that with a Caddyfile. So, um let’s use nano, the text editor, to create a new file called Caddyfile. And then in here, you want to do something very similar to this.

So, put your domain name here. And then in between the two curly brackets, what this is saying is basically the root of our website is going to be served from the /srv directory which is actually inside of our docker container. So let’s also go ahead and configure that. But let’s save this.

Crl X Capital Y Hit Enter

Crl x, capital y, hit enter. And let’s make a public directory here with mkdir public and then go into that directory and then use nano to make a index.html file. I’m going to paste in here um a very simple HTML structure. It has a title for the website as a Caddy Demo.

It has some styling here, some CSS styling, a big header, one element, like comment,, a paragraph, and then a link. So, let’s see what that looks like on the web browser. So, we’ll save that. Crl X, capital Y, hit enter.

And the last thing we want to do is modify our. Let’s go back a directory. We want to modify our Docker Compose file. So let’s open up uh that file again with nano.

Bottom We Want to Add a Section Here

And at the bottom we want to add a section here for volumes. So basically what this is doing is mapping that srv directory to the public directory where we just created the index.html file. And same thing uh for the Caddyfile. We want to map that into the docker container.

So um let’s go ahead and save that. And now what we can do is restart our docker container to reflect those changes. So we can do docker compose down and then docker compose up -d like we did in the beginning. And it looks like everything came up just fine.

Let’s Go Ahead and Minimize

So let’s go ahead and minimize this. And now instead of going to our IP address, let’s go to our domain name. So loolanta.org in my case. And we can explicitly specify https.

And there you have it. We have our website hosted on a cloud virtual machine, loaded from that index.html file with our styled header one element, a paragraph and a link here which actually takes you to my website where you can find like I said all the uh configuration files and everything that you need to copy and paste so you can follow along step by step. Now, the one big problem with hosting a free website on Google Cloud, as I alluded to earlier, is the fact that it only gives you one gigabyte of outbound data transfer per month. So, let’s say your website is 2 megabytes in size.

That’s only like 500 page views that you can have uh per month before you have to start paying, which I think it’s 12 cents per gigabyte of additional traffic beyond the free tier. So, um, it’s cheap, but you can see how that could get expensive pretty quickly if you have a very popular website. So, you can enable something like a CDN through Cloudflare that’s completely free. You’ll probably 10x depending on your cache rate, you’re 10x the amount of pages that you can serve.

Let’s Say 5 000

So, let’s say 5,000 pages per month on the free tier. Uh, but if that is still something that’s very limiting to you, you expect to have more pages, page views than that, more visitors, um, I recommend that you check out next, which has, um, there’s probably dozens of different ways that you can host a free website online. So, it’ll go over some of that. And I do keep a up-to-date list on my website, which I recommend that you check that out as well.

Everything’s linked in the description or on my website. Thank you guys for watching.