How i made this blog spending $1

The idea for this blog came to me when I decided to try out Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Most of my cloud computing experience had been with AWS, and I was missing some practice with other providers in order to become a more well-rounded professional. Also, a friend of mine told me that new GCP users get $300 in free credits to spend on their services 😄.

While thinking about which services I could use those credits on, I had another idea that fit perfectly: practicing my English! So I thought, why not set up a personal tech blog on GCP and share my experiences — including this one?

Following that plan, I asked ChatGPT for a simple self-hosted blogging tool. The first suggestion was WordPress, but I wanted something simpler. The second was Ghost.org. I ran it locally using Docker, and it seemed like a great choice. While checking Ghost’s configuration, I noticed two important things to take care of: the host domain and an SMTP server for sending emails. After some research, I discovered that GCP doesn’t provide domain registration or an SMTP mailing service (they don’t have something like AWS SES).

For the domain, I could get a free one — but not a pretty one 😅. So I started looking for available options with my surname. That left me with two: radespiel.io and radespiel.tech. Both matched my blog’s purpose, but radespiel.io cost around $10 per year, while radespiel.tech was only $1. That made the decision easy — now you already know the only thing I had to pay for!

For the SMTP service, I discovered Mail Sender, which offers a free plan that allows up to 3,000 emails per month.

Spinning up the VM on GCP to host my blog was simple and similar to creating an AWS EC2 instance. After the VM was ready, I connected through the browser, installed Docker, cloned the Ghost repository, adjusted the configuration with my domain and Mail Sender credentials — and it was ready to go!

Finally, I pointed my newly registered domain to the VM’s public IP (I had already allowed HTTPS connections during creation). Oh, I almost forgot — Ghost automatically generates a free TLS certificate using Let’s Encrypt, so I didn’t have to worry about that. After everything was set up, I accessed my fresh blog through the browser and did a bit of QA testing. During testing, I noticed that the email service only worked when sending messages to my own address. Later, I found out that my Mail Sender account needed activation. To do that, I had to answer a few questions about what kind of emails I’d send. After answering quickly, my account was activated, and I could send emails to any address!

Now everything works — all for just one dollar, at least until my GCP credits run out.

That’s it for my first post! It’s not very technical, but it’s a great start to gain confidence in English writing and share this experience.