Wow, it’s been a while!
While neglecting to publish some new posts due to being busy with work, I also overlooked the fact that after the GCP trial period ends, there is only a 30-day grace period for you to update to non-free status before they TERMINATE your compute VM. This means that while your deployment history and GCP project will still be kept, everything else – including the things you installed/changed on your VM – will be wiped.
Lately I have been speaking to some friends and relatives about the Covid-19 situation and whether there is anything I can do to help my family or the local community. Especially in these times when there is little freedom for people to go outside and enjoy brick-and-mortar establishments, it suddenly became ever-so-important to have an online presence in order to maintain connection to your customer base. Many companies’ research concludes that the average user is spending MUCH more time shopping online, playing online games, and watching online videos, which is a given.
In my resolve to offer my technical and digital assistance to potential local businesses I thought back to the time when I wrote a full tutorial on how to build a self-hosted WordPress site using your own secure domain. However, upon my disappointment I found that my website was no longer operational and I had not taken the time to make a backup image of my VM before GCP pulled the plug.
When all seemed lost, yesterday I looked back on my Google Drive folders and noticed an UpdraftPlus directory inconspicuously sitting there, and it suddenly clicked to me that I actually installed and setup a WordPress backup add-on which saved all my posts, media, and WordPress admin settings. My entire site was saved!! All it took was three hours of my time to spin up a GCP instance with WordPress already deployed, access the admin console, re-install UpdraftPlus, and feed in the backup files in order to restore all the posts and settings I made two years prior. It was a excruciatingly painless task, and I have the developers at UpdraftPlus to thank for creating such a great FREE plugin which saved me several weeks of tinkering and fiddling with GCP + WordPress settings and writing articles.
For those who are reading this and are WordPress site owners, I strongly urge you to give UpdraftPlus a chance. While this site is still in its infancy and modest at best, I do plan to monetarily support UpdraftPlus in the future if this site takes off in viewer count or in the event that I will be building sites for local businesses.