How To Install WordPress Onto Google Cloud

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**Updated 1/24/23**

How To Install WordPress Onto Google Cloud

Make sure you are logged into Google.

Then Go To:

https://cloud.google.com/free

Click On “Get Started For Free”

You will need to accept the terms of service and click continue.

You will have to enter your payment information. You will NOT be charged anything and there will NOT be an autocharge at the end of your free trial.  They need your credit card to verify your identity. In the image below you may already have a payment profile setup. You can use that if needed.  If you do not have a payment profile set up then you will need to select the option to create a payment profile.

***Before you start this assignment I highly recommend going to https://pay.google.com/ and make sure you have a valid credit card on there. Sometimes there is an expired credit card on the account that will give you issues. Update your credit card information, or enter a new one and you will not run into a problem.***

 

Enter your information and click “Start My Free Trial”

You may be asked some questions as shown below. You can answer them if you would like or just click the close button.

You may then see a popup.  Do not click on any of the solutions. Click “Skip For Now” as shown in the image below.

Installing WordPress On Google Cloud

Next we will install WordPress into our Google Cloud hosting. Make sure you are at the home page of the Google Cloud Services or click here: https://console.cloud.google.com/home

We want to access the marketplace as shown in the screenshot below.

In the search box of the marketplace do a search for “Bitnami WordPress”

Select the Option for “WordPress Certified By Bitnami & Automattic”

***Do not select the “MultiSite” or the “Multi-Tier.”    This will mess everything up!***

Once you select that option you will be presented with a screen where you can launch Bitnami.

If you see the following screen you can click “Enable”

You will now see a screen similar to the screenshot below. Do not worry about the estimated cost shown.  We are going to configure this for the free tier hosting from Google. Follow my instructions exactly in order to set this up correctly.

1. First enter a deployment name for your hosting.  Since this is being set up for a resume website I am inputting resume-website.  If you are doing a lawncare website then yo can put “lawncare-website.” It needs to be entered lower case, and there can be no spaces.

2. Enter the server you want to use. For the free tier you can select any of the us-west1, us-central1, or uswest1 options. Consider which region of the country will utilize your website the most and select the most appropriate server.  I choose the central location in the image below because it is the middle point of the country. You can choose any of the a , c , f, b options.

3. Change the machine type to fl-micro

4. Change the Boot disk size to 30gb

Everything else can be left the same. Just make sure you allow the firewall settings as shown below. Accept the terms of service and click “Deploy” to continue.

Once you click deploy your new hosting will take about two minutes to set up.

If you get the following warning you can ignore it:

When your deployment completes you should get a success message screen. On the right side will be several important pieces of information. The site address  is your URL and you can check your website there. The admin URL is where you can log into the dashboard of your website. The admin user is the username you will use to log into WordPress. The password is what you will use to log in.

***Important***  The Site Address from the image above is the IP Address of your website. Your IP address will be different that mine. Write down the IP address because you will need it in a few minutes. Based on the info in the image above, the ip address for my website is: 35.226.185.115.    Once again your IP Address will be different than mine so make sure you write down the correct IP Address.

To access the dashboard of WordPress you can click on the “Admin URL” shown in the image above. If it asks for your login information your username will be “user” and your password will come from the “Admin password” shown in the screenshot above.

Create A New Login.

We are going to create a new username and password and we will delete the old Username. Log into your WordPress Dashboard and then navigate to Users -> Add New

Enter a new user as shown below.  Do not use “user” or “admin as the username. These are easily hacked.  Use a good email address in case you lose your login information. Use a very strong password. Change your access to administrator. When all that is changed you can click “Add New User”

Now log out of your WordPress account as shown below:

Next you will need to log back in with your new account you just created.

Now we need to delete the default user account.  Go back to USERS -> Add New and then follow the steps shown in the screenshot below to delete the “user” account.

Change Your NameCheap DNS

Now we need to go and configure our DNS so that our URL points to the Google Cloud Server. Since we used namecheap for a free URL navigate there by following this address:  www.namecheap.com

Once you login, go to your domain list and then click on Manage for your URL.

Next you need to check to see if you have the default nameservers selected. You can see in the image below that I do not.  I need to change these to the default which I will show in the next step.

Select “Namecheap BasicDNS” from the dropdown and click the save arrow.

Next click on Advanced DNS at the top and then “ADD NEW RECORD”

When you click on ADD RECORD You will see something similar to the image below:

Read the next section slowly and thoroughly before attempting the next step.  Don’t rush this!

You will need to add two records. An “A” record and a CNAME record.  Enter the information as shown below.  The A record needs to be the IP address that Google Cloud assigned you which you wrote down earlier. (Do not enter my IP address 35.226.185.115 which is in the image below).You also need to enter the URL of your website exactly as it is in Namecheap. You will enter these records one at a time.  Click the green arrow to save each record.

If there are multiple A Records or CNAME Records, you should delete them. You should just have one A and one CNAME.

Once you click the green save arrows we will need to wait for the changes to show up. Do not do anything else until your DNS propagates. In other words do not continue until you see a blank WordPress installation when you type in your url that you bought from namecheap.  For me I will keep checking arnoldrobinson.xyz until I see a blank WordPress installation. When I set this up it took less than 10 minutes. However it could take a few hours.

If you go to your website and see a default screen from your URL registrar, or a 404 error, that means that your DNS did not propagate yet or you entered incorrect info. So, if you see a screen similar to the image below, double check your DNS info you entered in Namecheap. Make sure you only have one @ record and only have one CNAME record.

When you can see your blank WordPress installation you will know that it worked. An example of what a blank WordPress installation is shown below.