Google Cloud Cost For a Website

This is about my personal experience in google cloud cost, I make the title simple, but it’s not about overall “Google Cloud Cost” whatsoever. So people make mistakes. Including me, yeah. But I am grateful I learned a lot. I involved in a project that uses google cloud. The compute engine, the load balancer, the storage, and CDN, etc. I was the one who manages the budget, then I made a mistake, I didn’t know what I was doing. We should count the most basic yet pricey thing on the web development: Bandwidth.

Network Egress

The website is a popular company profile with a lot of images, traffics caused huge bandwidth, for me at least. We serve more than 2.7TB for a month, and that makes more than Rp. 4.000.000 counting on billing, that is only for the bandwidth, not for the compute engine yet. I was so depressed, haha.

Knowing it’s on over budget, I start to looking for the workaround to push the bandwidth down.

Cloud CDN

First I try the Google Cloud CDN. I put all images on google cloud storage and serve it behind Google CDN. No luck, Google CDN bandwidth is still expensive. I monitor the website for 2 days and it still cost me a lot.

Then I change CDN to Cloudflare, yeah, the free one, the first band-aid, I know, and it works. I reduce bytes send from the server about 60%. I need to figure out about going paid Cloudflare customers later.

Optimization

Then I started to optimize the server. I add limit rate, limit request, and limit connection. Until I see the line graph is going down. This is snippet of my nginx config.

   limit_rate 256k;
   limit_req zone=<req_limit> burst=20 nodelay;
   limit_req_status 429;
   limit_conn <con_limit> 50;

I still do not know if this is affect the SEO or web analytics, we will see.