Last week I published two articles about finding the best VPS provider for your crypto trading bots. In the first article, we compared different VPS hosts to find the best one for your trading bots and the second article provided a full tutorial on setting up your Ubuntu server from start to finish. If you missed them, I would recommend taking a look first:

If you have a limited budget, today we are going to have a look at how you can take advantage of Google Cloud Platform's welcome offer, and use one of their Always Free micro VPS servers. Google does put in place some thresholds on traffic and storage use, however, their welcome offer gives you a $300 voucher which is valid for the first 12 months - which will essentially allow you to run your crypto trading bots for free.

Just note that you will need to provide credit card details to create your Virtual Private Server (VPS) for trading bots, however, Google will not charge you unless you give them permission to do so - and they will not ask until all of your free credit has run out. Perfect!

Create a test account on Google Cloud Platform

Google offers a huge range of VPS configurations, which compared to DigitalOcean makes its interface a little more complicated to navigate. So don't worry if you have to click around a bit to find things. Step one you need to visit Google cloud console and press the Try For Free button.

Google Cloud Platform

Once you fill in all the details as required and provide a credit card. If you did everything correctly you should receive a message as follows:

As you can see the message confirms your new account has free trial credit and that Google will not take any payment without you upgrading your account & giving them permission. And you can always monitor your account's billing section to be sure.

How to create your Ubuntu VPS on Google Cloud Platform

Now I will walk you through the configuration steps for creating your own Ubuntu server for your crypto trading bots or to mint GasTokens. The key benefit for setting this up on your VPS is to have no downtime and as a result, it will be much more profitable for you.

You need to open the Compute Engine section of Google's admin interface and click the create button. Now you may see quite a few notifications asking you to enable billing. Remember, you can simply dismiss these messages because you have the trial credit to use and if you do enable it then Google has permission to auto-charge your card - so don't click blindly!

The next page will have the full configuration of your VPS, here you will be able to decide your server setup. You can choose a custom hostname, just be careful with the datacenter locations as only us-central1 (Iowa) or us-east1 (South Carolina) will result in the micro VPS configuration that always remains free to use.

And on the Boot disk section, you will want to click the Change button. Here you can decide the operating system you would like on your server. I recommend using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and setting your boot disk size to 25 GB.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Important

As you are setting up your VPS configuration, keep your eye on the text which is displayed on the right next to your settings. It should look like below and show a message about free usage time, if that message is not being displayed then your VPS instance's configuration does not fall under Google's range of free products.

Once you are happy with your configuration, you finish the process by clicking the Create button. As you can see, Google indicates that this instance will use your free trial credit.

Just wait a few moments and your Ubuntu server will be up and running. There is a little dropdown box which will open an ssh-shell in a new browser window for you.

And from there you can follow our in depth tutorial on setting up NodeJS and using Tmux to manage your crypto trading bots.

Once you have finished configuring your server, you can then run any of our released tools without any downtime:

Pricewatch Bot - Execute buy or sell orders on Saturn following your trading strategy, a taker bot.

- Execute buy or sell orders on Saturn following your trading strategy, a taker bot. Market Maker Bot - Automatically create buy or sell orders following your strategy, engineered to keep a token's order book healthy.

- Automatically create buy or sell orders following your strategy, engineered to keep a token's order book healthy. GasToken Miner - Tokenize gas on Ethereum or Ethereum Classic by mining GST1 or GST2 tokens.

- Tokenize gas on Ethereum or Ethereum Classic by mining GST1 or GST2 tokens. Airdrop Tool - Easily airdrop your token to hundreds of wallets after a successful bounty campaign.

- Easily airdrop your token to hundreds of wallets after a successful bounty campaign. RSI Trading Bot - Monitor a token’s Relative Strength Index to create automated trading strategies based off RSI signals.

Optional Add Your Own SSH Credentials

Google Cloud Platform works a little different when setting up your Ubuntu server and does not give you a root password, it is disabled by default. Therefore, it is a little more tricky to log in with your own ssh client and use a customised terminal. Google really tries to push you to always use their own tools, but it is not impossible to setup.

Here is a very good video tutorial I found which shows you how to add your SSH Key to your Google Cloud Console.

If you are wondering what your username is, you can log via the ssh-shell in the browser and type whoami this will display your username. Or alternatively you could create a new username with sudo adduser myfirstgoogleserverusername and change the last part accordingly.

Happy cloud trading!

Hope you enjoyed this article on setting up a free Ubuntu VPS for crypto trading bots!

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