Using Google Cloud Platform For WordPress Hosting: What To Expect

When it comes to WordPress hosting, the options in terms of infrastructure are plenty. You can go the traditional shared web hosting or VPS route, or you can opt for the cloud. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but for cloud hosting, the biggest plus points are greater scope for scalability and better performance.

Speaking of cloud hosting, Google Cloud Platform has recently emerged as a worthy name. How exactly does it fare when compared to other players in the same league? In this post, we will attempt to seek an answer to this question.

Using Google Cloud Platform For WordPress Hosting

WordPress Hosting: The Options

Considering the fact that WordPress is the world’s most popular Content Management System, there is no shortage of hosting options for a WordPress website. In fact, you can get decent level of web hosting for as low as $5 per month, with shared resources. Such web hosting, among other things, has a distinct advantage: it fits virtually all budgets, and you can be assured of acceptable performance without burning a hole in your pocket. As and when your site grows, you can opt for VPS, semi-dedicated or dedicated servers, and so on.

Of course, generic web hosting has its own cons as well. For instance, while you can run WordPress websites on such platforms, these are not WordPress optimized platforms, and so the performance, as good as it might be, will not be exemplary. For such cases, managed WordPress hosting is a better pick, as you can have the additional benefits of WordPress-optimized servers: security fixes, caching, WordPress updates, etc. all come under the jurisdiction of managed WordPress hosting.

While the term “cloud” in itself has been overused many times in the hosting world, speaking purely in terms of WordPress usage, true cloud hosting can offer great scalability and better performance. It is, as a result, quite obvious why many popular websites rely on cloud infrastructure, and options such as Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform continue to grow in popularity.

What is Google Cloud Platform?

In simple words, Google Cloud Platform is a computing platform offered by Google that, among other enterprise-level offerings, allows you to host your projects on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its end user products. So in other words, your website can run on the same infrastructure and setup that is being used Google Search or YouTube, for instance.

Quite obviously, this is a direct advantage for your website, as Google’s infrastructure, speaking purely in terms of hosting, is one of the best in the world (when was the last time you heard Google Search had an outage?).

Google Cloud Platform: Comparison

There are many other cloud services that offer a set of features at par with Cloud Platform. For instance, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are popular options.

Speaking of Amazon Web Services, or AWS as it is popularly called, it has been around longer than Google Cloud Platform, and offers plenty of features such as load balancing servers and auto-scaling. In fact, AWS is more popular than most other public cloud options, and currently controls over 28% of the market share.

Similarly, Microsoft Azure is a popular public cloud option too, and it is especially helpful for Windows developers looking for a hybrid cloud option. Azure offers all that Google Cloud Platform has to offer, and takes care of security fixes and updates, leaving you to deal with just your code and nothing else.

So how does Google Cloud Platform fare when compared to the others?

Honestly speaking, there is not much of a difference in terms of features and quality of service. You get terrific cloud storage, the ability to scale as and when needed, you pay for only what you use, and so on. However, there is one key concept that Google Cloud Platform has mastered: simplicity of operation.

Unlike AWS or Azure, where you are given everything in one go and it is all up to you how to use it all, Google Cloud Platform offers you the products tailored to fit your needs. The level of abstraction is refined in GCF, and not so refined in AWS.

More importantly, Google Cloud Platform turns out to be cheaper in the longer run — the sustained usage pricing model that works by rounding off the number of minutes used, and then discounting the baseline hourly rate, is cheaper and more flexible than Amazon Web Services or Azure.

But the big question is: can Google Cloud Platform be actually useful for WordPress hosting?

Google Cloud Platform and WordPress Hosting

When it comes to WordPress hosting, there are few special factors that can go a long way in ensuring terrific performance for your website.

For instance, speed is of optimum importance. However, WordPress is generally used in accordance with several plugins, in order to extend its functionality. While there are many things that you can do at your end to ensure a speedy performance for your website, the role of your web hosting infrastructure cannot be understated. This is why you hear many web hosting providers so often telling their clientele to employ a caching plugin or use lesser number of plugins. Back and forth operations with the database is not something a routine or below par hosting configuration can handle.

Google Cloud Platform can be of great advantage for such cases. With state of the art infrastructure that takes care of issues such as load balancing and scalability, your WordPress website can operate at a smooth pace, even if you activate multiple plugins simultaneously. Issues such as 503 errors owing to poor hosting infrastructure or lesser memory limits are no longer a headache.

Furthermore, the fact that Google’s public cloud offering offers you geographically diverse infrastructure, it also eliminates the need of a CDN to a great extent. Of course, a CDN is still a possibility and a good thing to have, but even without one, running a site on the infrastructure that Google trusts and uses is definitely the best decision that you can take.

Thus, if coupled with nginX caching, WordPress websites and applications hosted on Google Cloud Platform can outperform sites hosted elsewhere, all thanks to the impressive performance of Google Cloud Platform.

Don’t believe it yet? Why not try it yourself without spending a dime? Simply create a free Tap site and see the difference for yourself!