This post series will help you with the step-by-step process of registering for a domain, setting up a cloud server, and installing all the software and apps needed to run your websites online. When you create a domain, it does nothing until you point or forward the domain’s name to a server. The server hosts your content. The content you want your audience to view and use online. Since we already have a registered domain, let’s go and get a Google Cloud server that we will use to host our content. If you haven’t read our previous post, go and read it before going forward with the series. The post can be found at the link below. How to create your website domain Google Cloud Platform is HUGE! It’s just not for running cloud servers. Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services and infrastructure that can be used to power IT services and business operations. For this series, we’re going only going to be using Google Cloud server resources to run our website. With Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we can spin up a cloud server which is a virtual machine running on Google Computing infrastructure. With it, run our websites.
How to sign up for Google Cloud
By this time you should have a Gmail account. Having a Gmail account which makes it easy to use Google’s services. Head over to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and register for an account if you don’t already have one. Sign up for Google Cloud Click the blue button: “Get started for free” located in the upper-right corner of the page. Next, sign in with your Gmail account and register. You may be able to get a $300 credit for registering. Once registration is complete, you should have a Google Cloud Platform account. At this point, you won’t be charged anything because you are not using any of Google’s Cloud services yet.
How to create a Google Cloud server
Now that you have created a Google Cloud Platform account, let’s go and create a Google Cloud server resource. We will forward the domain we created in our previous post to point to this Google server which is going to be our host for hosting our content online. To create a new Google Cloud Server, go to the menu on the top left and navigate to Compute Engine ==> VM instances as shown in the image below. If you haven’t created a project, you’ll be prompted to create a new project before creating a VM instance. Next, from the Compute Engine ==> VM instances page, click the CREATE INSTANCE button as shown below. Doing this will create a new virtual machine in Google Cloud infrastructure that we can use it to host our content. This may take a few minutes for Compute Engine to prepare a VM instance. When ready, you should see a page to see VM setup details. On the VM creating page, choose to Create a new VM from scratch. Then use the bullet points below to select and provide other details for the new server. Name: Give your server a name that starts with a lowercase letter. If a new is not compatible with the Google Cloud server name, it will prompt you to change it. Region: A region is a specific geographical location where you can run your Google Cloud resources. You’ll typically want to select the region that your server will primarily be accessed. Zone: A zone is an isolated location within a region that determines where your data are stored. A zone is typically closer to a region. Machine configuration: Google Cloud offers different virtual machine configurations. Choose the one that fits your needs and budget. Machine family – General purpose CPU Series – CPU generation Machine Type – CPU and Memory allocation. Boot disk: This is where you choose the operating system for your Google Cloud server. Linux Debian is selected by default. There are other types of operating systems you can choose from. For this tutorial, we’re going to be using Ubuntu Linux. Click Change, these choose Ubuntu Linux. Firewall: If you want to connect to the web from your Google Cloud server, make sure to allow both HTTP and HTTPS traffic. Add tags and firewall rules to allow specific network traffic from the Internet
Allow HTTP traffic Allow HTTPS traffic
Once you’re done selecting the VM instance details, click the Create button to create your first VM. After a few moments, the first VM server should be created and ready. Under External IP, you’ll find your server’s public or external IP address. This is the IP address we will forward or point to the domain we created earlier too. Take notes of the External IP address.
How to point a domain name to the server
Now that you have created a Google Cloud server and you have an external IP address, go back to your domain registrar website. For us, it’s Google Domains. Once you log in to Google Domains, click on the domain name, then select DNS. On the DNS page, scroll down to Custom records in the middle. Then expand the Custom records tile, and add your first record.
Host name field, leave blank Type = A TTL 3600 Data: IP address of the host
When you’re done, click the Save button. When you’re done, a new record will show up when the website domain points to the server’s IP address. Now the domain name is pointing to a server or host IP address. At this time, the server is live but there is no content created yet. In our next post, we will show you how to create a web server and content on the Google Cloud server we created above. That should do it! Conclusion: This post showed you how to create a Google Cloud server. It also showed you how to point or forward a domain name to a server IP address. If you find any error above or have something to add, please use the comment form below.
