As of
Est. 

My Server Freebie

🖥 With the Free Usage Tier of Google Cloud Platform you get a small box at no cost.

Infrastructure as a Service

The main components of GCP's Infrastructure as a Service offering are

  • Compute Engine:
    CPU & RAM, Disk & OS, Image- & Snapshot-Storage
  • Virtual Private Cloud:
    External IP, Firewall, Routing
  • Networking:
    Load Balancing, DNS, CDN, and others
  • Cloud Storage (Buckets)

GCP supports creation and supervision of resources via the web application at console.google.cloud.com and via its gcloud command line interface. The gcloud command can be run from any host, including GCP's Cloud Shell.

Mini Configuration

I chose a small machine to start with. After all the promise is that I can scale at any time.

  • e2-micro VM (2 vCPU, 1GB memory)
  • 10 GB standard persistent disk
  • Ubuntu Focal
  • A (fixed) static external IP address
  • Weekly automated snapshots

Even if it runs 24x7, this configuration remains within the usage limits for Google's free tier. For the free tier usage limits, it doesn't matter if I run one of these machines for the entire month, or if I run 30 of these machines on a single day that month.