Move off Google Cloud

The GCE instance runs on a three-year commitment that ends 25 September 2026, so the instance has to be gone before then. Storage and domains are moving at the same time.

Compute

• Size the DigitalOcean droplet — 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM is the working baseline
• Provision it, see Provisioning a host
• Update the GitHub environment and repository secrets
• Prove deploy over SSH
• Prove deploy over the tunnel, see Cloudflare Access
• Run the setup script end to end on a clean host
• Decommission the GCE instance

Storage

• Move object storage to Cloudflare R2
• Set up the CDN with presigned URLs
• Confirm final database snapshots restore cleanly, see MySQL backups

Domains

• Finish the Squarespace transfers, see Domain names

Current instance

For sizing the replacement. us-central1, general-purpose E2, 2 vCPU, 5 GB memory, 20 GB disk at about 71% used, plus roughly 184 GiB of object storage.

Costs dropped noticeably after unused resources were removed on 2026.03.20.