WordPress on Google Cloud: What You Need To Know

Thinking About Hosting Your WordPress Site on Google Cloud?

Choosing a website host is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a business owner. Why? Because today’s consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less. If your website doesn’t make the cut, chances are they’ll move on to a competitor with a much faster website.

A traditional virtual private server (VPS) typically has a physical location. Depending on where your customers are located in relation to the server, the website will load at various speeds. But when hosting on a cloud server, your website can load from different locations around the world through both physical and virtual machines within the two-second consumer attention span.

By hosting WordPress on Google Cloud, also known as Compute Engine, you not only get faster load times but many more added benefits. This is why Google Cloud Platform is the select host to some of the world’s biggest companies like HTC, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Snapchat, Sony Music, and many more.

Benefits of Hosting WordPress on Google Cloud

Reliability

Google Cloud Engine is the main infrastructure for some of the most used online platforms, such as Gmail and YouTube. It is also the backbone of many eCommerce and news websites that require excellent server uptimes. As you know, any hiccup with hosting can cost your business serious financial losses.

Google does this through auto-healing technology. To put it simply, the Google Cloud Platform performs regular health checks on your website. Should anything go wrong, it will go through a series of protocols to fix the issue without any intervention. Visit Google to find more in-depth information on how auto-healing works.

Security

Choosing to host your WordPress on Google Cloud also comes with added security benefits. This should be a top priority, especially for enterprise WordPress sites.
The Google Cloud Platform provides the same level of security to hosted WordPress sites as they do to their own private products. This is a model they’ve built and improved upon through the past 15 years. Instead of simply telling you that your data is locked down at Google Data Centers, here are a few details of their top tier security benefits:

• All the data is encrypted as it passes between services, the website visitor, and the data centers.
• Google works with some of the world’s biggest Internet Service Providers, which means fewer transitions across the world wide web.
• You also have the option to use two-factor authentication and physical hardware keys to protect access to your cloud.

Speed

The Google Cloud Platform was recently named the “best performing cloud for 2021” by Cockroach labs. The report compared performance and cost between Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. But Google has even bigger plans to grow its lightning-fast service.
At the time this article was written, Google’s cloud infrastructure consists of:

Twenty-five regions, 76 zones, 144 edge locations, and is available in 200+ countries and territories. The tech company boasts a network of numerous fiber optic links and subsea cables around the world.
With all that being said, what does this mean when you host your WordPress on Google Cloud? More direct paths between the cloud and the consumers, resulting in vast performance improvements.

Scalability

In a world where anyone or anything can go viral, it’s comforting to know your website won’t crash or slow down when thousands of users try to access it. The Google Cloud Platform is made to handle traffic spikes and growth with the use of autoscaling.

Autoscaling is a service provided by cloud platforms to automatically adjust the computing resources being used. In other words, when you have low traffic on your website or app, it will reduce the number of virtual machines being used. On the other hand, it will increase your VMs when traffic increases. You can read more about the nitty-gritty details of autoscaling here.

But for our purposes, you can rest assured that once you set up autoscaling, resource limitation shouldn’t be a problem when hosting your WordPress on Google Cloud. This brings us to our next point – super flexible billing.

Pricing: Is hosting WordPress on Google Cloud worth it?

One of the top features of hosting WordPress on Google Cloud is using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Which means you are only paying for the resources you use. The platform comes with built-in budgeting tools, alerts, quota limits, and more so you can be in total control of your spending. If you need help figuring out resource needs, the Recommender tool can give you AI-based insights to optimize your instance usage.

They also offer discounts for long-term workloads or pre-paying for usage. For example, using a VM for a month will reduce your price. You can even get an estimate by using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator.

Plus, there’s no risk in getting started because the Google Cloud Platform comes with a free tier that has certain monthly limitations, a free trial period, or $300 in free credits. So, you can put their servers to the test by running and deploying real-world workloads and see the performance for yourself.

Final Thoughts: Get Started with WordPress on Google Cloud

Many business owners put website hosting changes on hold due to the complexity of the project. But trust us, once you decide on making the change, the sooner, the better. If you plan to grow your business but need a flexible plan that adjusts to your needs, Google Cloud is the way to go. You can start seeing improvements right away.

Talk to your web developer or IT manager about moving forward to step up your online presence with Google Cloud. Migrating from your current web hosting service and configuring it on Google should be done by a trusted expert who can back up and export your website in little to no time. Additionally, Google Cloud has a database of resources to help your team get started with short tutorials, training, and certifications. Plus tiered support packages to help should you run into issues or get stuck.