Google Cloud price increase

General
1

I run pihole on the Google cloud free for ever tier. Received an email today that they were introducing a charge for an external IP.

does anyone know if this applies to the free tier, or using any other free service they recommend, hopefully with a URL to a pihole setup tutorial.

thanks .. Mike

2

Have you considered buying a Pi Zero W and running Pi-Hole locally? That's a startup cost of about $15 and after that your only cost is a dollar or so of electricity per year, if you pay for your electricity separately.

3

I should have said I run 2, one on Pi for the local lan, and Google cloud for when travelling.

4

You can set up a VPN back to your home Pi and use that while traveling. You can split tunnel if you wish, and route only the DNS traffic home while the data traffic runs on whichever network the client is on.

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/overview/

5

I feel I dont have the knowledge to be secure about opening ports on the lan, and also the PI isnt on 24x7, holidays etc.

2 machines seemed a neater solution.

6

If the Pi is not on at all times, how are home clients getting DNS resolution when the Pi is offline?

7

if there are home clients the Pi is online

8

It looks to be about $2.50USD a month for IP costs.

Usual caveat about "Do Not Run An Open DNS Resolver Anywhere." and "The Developers Will Not Help You."

1 Like
9

thats what I figured. Its protected by a VPN.

anyone recommend an alternative free cloud service for pihole ?

12

External IP addresses attached to free vms are also free. From network pricing page

Note: Starting January 1st, 2020, GCP will introduce an additional charge for publicly addressed VM instances that don't fall under the Free Tier. You will not be charged for other publicly addressed resources, such as forwarding rules.

and from the free tier page

Your Always Free f1-micro instance limit is by time, not by instance. Each month, eligible use of all of your f1-micro instances and associated external IP addresses are free until you have used a number of hours equal to the total hours in the current month

1 Like
13

many thanks - will wait to see any charges in January