Instance Hard Drive

[Kobra]

I'm relatively new to GCP opening an account on 29 July, 2021. I'm developing a website for our high school class of 1958. We're all now in our 80's and mostly on fixed incomes. Hence, I'd like to make sure we can operate our site at as reasonable a cost as we can. I'm currently under the 90 day plan with $300 credit from Google to develop a site. Then I'd like to transfer to the "Free Tier". It took me several tries to figure everything out selecting the proper hardware and software and keep everything under the "Free Tier" plan but I thought I did it. Today I noticed a recommendation from Google to turn off my Instance-03 hard disk to save $6/month. I don't understand this because all I have currently operating is one drive on Instance-03. If I shut it down, my website will go away.  Should I just ignore this recommendation and see how costs finalize at the end of the month or am I missing something? Thanks for any help you can recommend.

[TrickSumo]

Hi there,

I think you had created E2-micro instance as mentioned in this document:- https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute

But always free eligible compute engine type is N1 Series f1-micro (0.6 GB) at these regions:-

Oregon: us-west1
Iowa: us-central1
South Carolina: us-east1

Also, make sure to use standard HDD disk below 30GB.

If need further help, please let me know 🙂

Thanks and Regards

Rishi Tiwari

[glen_yu]

If your website is mostly a static site, you don't need to host it on a VM -- you can consider just hosting it by directly dropping those HTML / CSS files, etc. into a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) Bucket:

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website

It will cost you pennies per month to host that (unless you get an absurd amount of traffic...)

(Example: my personal page is hosted via a GCS bucket -- http://www.glenyu.me)

[TrickSumo]

UPDATE:

Sorry for wrong information above. 

The Free Tier F1-micro (N1 series) VM is changing to the E2-micro VM as the VM to use for free. So after August 1, 2021 E2-micro VM will be Free Tier eligible.

So please use E2-micro VM with 30 GB HDD in Oregon, Iowa and South Carolina regions.

Thanks