How to Host Your Portfolio Website on Google Cloud Platform Storage Bucket for under $5?
I work in Software Engineering field and I always wanted to build the My Portfolio Website but I never did… Finally I decided to build the Portfolio Website and below are the steps that I followed to built it. I wish it will be helpful to build your portfolio site too.
- I used below YouTube Video to create my Portfolio Website.
This video is really great, it walks you through each step in detail and you really don’t have to know HTML, CSS or JavaScript to build your portfolio. You just need to know follow it step by step. In the video it shows to use AWS(Amazon Webservices) which you can also use but I have decided to use Google Cloud Platform.
2. Test Portfolio Website
Before you deploy your portfolio you should test it locally and make all the modifications before you upload to the Google Cloud Platform(GCP).
3. Sign up for Google Cloud Platform Trial
You can sign up for Google Cloud Platform Trail using this link. This is like you sign up for the hosting provider which will host your website. GCP provides more functionality than you will need but its one stop shop if you already familiar or uses their other services like Gmail/G Suit. Please be aware you will need your credit card information to complete the sign up successfully but google does provide $300 credit for the first 90 days that should be enough for you to play around and if you decide to stick with this then you can use it. if you want to estimate how much will it cost before you commit, you can this use Google Price Calculator. you will need to select Cloud Storage and fill up the require information. I won’t go into the details of the each field but if you aren’t sure what it meant Please use the Help through(?) icon. It’s very self explanatory.
4. Create Google Cloud Storage Bucket
Once you complete the step 3, I would recommend creating a new project called “dev” which essentially means Development where you can test before you actually ready to deploy. Once you created the “dev” project, Please click on Storage Option → Browse. It will take you to the next page called “Storage Browser”. This sound like crazy but this behaves much like how your local file system does on your computer(e.g C drive etc) but fundamentally its different which you don’t have to go in the detail to host your Portfolio site.
Once you are ready, Please click on “+ CRATE BUCKET” from the top of the page. Please fill free to select any name you would like but please keep in mind that this name has to be unique across all the Google Cloud Platform meaning like your email address is unique and no one else can have the same email id, this name has to be unique. Once you decide on your Bucket Name, hit continue where you need to pick Location Type its nothing but where you file is going to reside. Please leave the location as default as Google automatically picks the one that is closer to you but you may want to change the Location Type to Region as your won’t need to worry about high availability and within one Region they do have multiple zones and this option is cheaper than the Multi-region.
Leave all other settings as Default but please change the Access Control setting under “Choose how to control access to objects” change it to Uniform, this allows you to open these files to public under that bucket so that you don’t have to do for the each file. Please click on create.
Once the bucket is successfully created, you can click on bucket name and upload the required files and folders for your portfolio.
The final step to make this public meaning accessible to anyone through internet is to provide the permission to do that please click on the Permission link and click on “ADD”. You need to enter “allUsers” as the New members name and select the role as “Storage Object Viewer”. This permission will give the ability to public users to see your portfolio.
Once above steps are completed your portfolio is live and available. To test it, Please click on the file and to share the link(URL) please click on Copy URL.
5. Create Domain name for your portfolio
I am not going to cover the step as I believe its not needed to have your own Domain name as you can share the link but if you really interested you can follow the guide though this link.
