Seeking advice on upgrading my GCP Wordpress hosting to higher resource limits

[Thomas3]

My Wordpress site is hosted on the (Bitnami) GCP. I usually get charged only around $1.00 per month, which has been great. But I plan to hopefully start getting a little more traffic soon. So I want to be ready, in case I start to exceed my GCP resource limits. 

My Wordpress site is hosted on a GCP “f1-micro”, so I guess I would just move to a GCP “g1-small”. Although, I have seen on some other forums people said the GCP hosting cost went surprisingly high after making this move. I have about $250 free credits remaining, so this would last me a very long time, if I don’t change anything. 

So my question is, can I move back to the (almost free cost) “f1-micro” in the future, if I need to?

Any other advice about this would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[DamianS]

Hello @Thomas3  ,Welcome on Google Cloud Community.

yes, you can always perform downgrade. I see that the lowest ( and probably the cheapest ) machine tier is e2-micro. The same machine type is listed at documentation related with free tier. 
"

1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions: Oregon: us-west1 Iowa: us-central1 South Carolina: us-east1 30 GB-months standard persistent disk 1 GB of outbound data transfer from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

Your Free Tier e2-micro instance limit is by time, not by instance. Each month, eligible use of all of your e2-micro instances is free until you have used a number of hours equal to the total hours in the current month. Usage calculations are combined across the supported regions. Compute Engine free tier does not charge for an external IP address. GPUs and TPUs are not included in the Free Tier offer. You are always charged for GPUs and TPUs that you add to VM instances. Learn more"

Free tier URL Docs: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features?_gl=1*1a2hrv8*_up*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjw1emzBhB8...

Machine resources: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-resource

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cheers,
DamianS
LinkedIn medium.com Cloudskillsboost

[Thomas3]

Thanks so much. Very helpful information.

The only time I have any problems currently is if I update too many plugins at the same time and my site goes above it's CPU limits. Then GCP stops my site. It seems updating plugins would have more CPU usage than site visitors?

So hopefully, just having a little more visitor traffic, my site will be fine on the current free tier. I am using a caching plugin and my images are all optimized at a small size.

[DamianS]

Yep, this might be a cause. I hated this resource consumption when I've played with WordPress 😉