Starting a Google Clound Instance

April 05, 2020

The Google Cloud Platform has lots of untapped potential as a host of novice webpages and personal projects.

This is in part because of their incredibly lenient free trial system that gives users $300 of free credit and a year to use it with no strings attached.

The process for singing up for the free trial is simple.

Go to Google Cloud Console and sign in with your google account.

Activate the Free Trial

At the top of the page there should be a banner that tells you to activate you trial. Follow the steps and billing information.

Note: Google will not automatically renew any payments or charge your card.

Create a Project

Creating a project allows you to categorize different VM’s and maintain organization. For now make a project with the name of your choosing by going to the top nav bar, clicking on the project list, and clicking New Project.

Creating a VM Instance

In the Hamburger menu in the top left navigate to Compute Engine > VM Instances.

Here, select Create Instance.

Next you can customize the instance name, hardware, operating system, network rules, etc. For now if you intend on making a simple website, leave the CPU/Memory at its default. However if your needs vary you may want to customize these parameters.

Change The operating system to be your preferred choice, I generally choose an LTS version of Ubuntu such as 18.04.

Next Check the boxes to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Then, expand the more options sections and go to the Networking tab. Click on the network interfaces section. Under External IP select Create IP address and enter a name of your choice.

Finally click Create.

SSH Into the Instance

To SSH into your GCP instance click the SSH button. This should open a new window with an SSH terminal where you can develop and deploy a site.