How can I tell how much it costs to run a low traffic WordPress site on GCP

Question

Started a GCP free trial, migrated two WordPress sites with almost zero traffic to test the service. Here's what I'm running for each of the two sites:

VM: g1-small (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory) 10gb SSD Package: bitnami-wordpress-5-2-4-1-linux-debian-9-x86-64

After about 1-2 months it seems to show that $46 has been deducted from the $300 free trial credit. Is this accurate / typical? Am I looking at paying $20+ per month to process perhaps 100 hits to the site from myself, plus any normal bot crawling that happens? This is roughly 10 times more expensive than a shared hosting multi domain account available from other web hosts.

Overall, how can I tell how much it will actually cost, when it looks to me that GCP reports about $2 of resource consumption per month, a $2 credit, and somehow a $254 balance from $300? Also GCP says average monthly cost is 17 cents on one of the billing pages, which is different from the $2 and the $46 figures. I can't find any entry that would explain all the other resources that were paid/credited.

Answer 1

Running a 2x g1-small (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory) 10 GB SSD package 24*7 should have deducted around -$26 from your free trial. MySQL will cost you a minimum of of $7.67 per month. If you use 2 MySQL instances it'll be $15. So  $26 Compute +$15 DB +$5 for other DNS costs rounds up to $46.

You will get big discounts for committed use of these services.

• Optimize your costs- Plan your usage using cost calculator https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/. Compute and relational storage are the most cost prohibitive factors here. Cloud run will reduce your costs significantly. The below link shows how to set it up.

https://medium.com/acadevmy/how-to-install-a-wordpress-site-on-google-cloud-run-828bdc0d0e96

• Scalability- When your user base grows you might want to use:
  • CDN helps with network costs 
  • Save images in cloud storage to bring down costs.