What are to-dos for beginner level system admin?

[hidezumi]

I have just started to try Google Cloud Platform to host small WordPress projects and unfortunately, I don't have a technical background.

I have a few questions. 

What are the minimum to-dos for a beginner-level system administrator?

I have tried taking snapshots (backup) and a VM manager to patch the Operating system. Are there any other things to do to maintain the system safely as possible?

Where do snapshots are stored?

I have checked the disk usage using the df command and found out 42% of 10 GB disk space. After taking the snapshot, I found the using disk space hasn't been changed though the size of the snapshot is 1GB. Is there any other storage generated? I mean do I have to pay for the extra cost every time I generate the snapshot?

I am quite new and I am not sure if I have chosen the right category for my question but I hope I can get useful insights here. 

[abdelfettah]

We have a course on coursera about securing GCE [1]

You also might want to turn on shielded vm's [2]

It's a bit odd that your snapshot size is not the same size as the original disk, when taking the snapshot you have to passe a size to gcloud [3]

And last but not least we have a feature to automatically snapshot disks, you can check this doc for how to use it [4] and this one for best practices [5]

[1] https://www.coursera.org/lecture/security-best-practices-in-google-cloud/compute-engine-security-U8f...

[2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/shielded-vm/docs/shielded-vm

[3] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/create-snapshots#creating_a_new_persistent_disk_from_a_s...

[4] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/scheduled-snapshots

[5] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/snapshot-best-practices