Been planning to do this for ages, old blog was using marketplace image in GCP with WordPress, downside was that it was hard/impossible to update components so the old site was running on fumes and not really being something I could update.
I run a really simple setup in OCI, just a VM on private subnet which has all the necessary components + Load Balancer in front to terminate SSL there. Load Balancer only allows traffic from the internet for ports 443 and 80, and port 80 gets redirected to 443 in LB.
Also, have port 22 allowed from my own home machine when I need to connect to the server itself.
Design
Here’s a diagram on above:
Just to break it down further, two subnet – public & private. OCI Load Balancer in public terminates SSL/HTTPS and backend is then my VM.
On the VM I have typical components for WordPress as you can see and then some additional WordPress Plugins.
I use NameSilo for DNS, Let’s Encrypt for the cert. I have acme.sh script to run from crontab every day, if cert renewal is less than 30 days, it will update it and use OCI CLI to upload the cert to Load Balancer. Nothing is then required to be done manually.
One thing on the DNS change from GCP to OCI, I forgot to change TTL before switch so had to wait day extra! Should remember that from real world migrations always. 🙂
I typically use Oracle Linux for everything but my old server was running Ubuntu, so decided to stay with the same.
Cost breakdown
Not much to breakdown with these components. I’m using VM Standard E2.1, why? It’s the cheapest VM model I could find since I’m paying this myself.
I could use the A1.Flex shapes but had those free OCPUs already in use.
| Resource | Spec | Est. cost per month |
| VM.Standard.E1 | 1 OCU / 8GB RAM | ~$30 |
| Boot Volume | 50 GB Block Storage | ~$1.30 |
| Flexible Load Balancer | 10 Mbps min / max | ~$5.80 |
| Egress | 10 TB free | $0 |
| Total | ~$37/month |
Not overly expensive, in the past I was able to run cheaper VM shape in GCP but lately all the cheapest ones were taken if I had to reboot the VM. So, will be small savings also running this in OCI.
That’s it! I do like how easy everything was to setup in OCI, mostly just since I use it daily I guess but doesn’t harm to be biased sometimes!