Create your Google Cloud Services Account & launch a server

Just go to Google Cloud Services (GCS) and create a free trial account, which will grant you a $300 bonus. Yes, you have to put in your credit card, but you can cancel the subscription before you run out of the bonus. You can run a pretty powerful server for under $50, which means you can run it for free for more than half a year!

Once you’ve set up your account go ahead and create a new project. On the upper left side, you will see the Navigation menu, click on Cloud Launcher in the PRODUCTS section. In the search bar type “MEAN” and then choose “MEAN Certified by Bitnami”.

Here are the settings that worked best for me:

MEAN server settings

Click Deploy button on the bottom of the page and wait a few minutes…

Once your server is deployed type “External IP addresses” in the GC search bar and set up a static IP address, so you won’t be given a new IP every time your server restarts.

Next thing you want to do is open port 9735 in your firewall settings because this port is used by Lightning network nodes. If you leave this port closed, other nodes won’t be able to open a channel or connect to your node.

Notice, your node will still be able to connect to others if you leave it closed!

In your GC console go to “VPC network” and choose “Firewall rules”, click “CREATE FIREWALL RULE” and use the following settings:

Firewall rule

Click “Create” on the bottom of the page and your rule will be created.

Now go to Navigation menu on the left and click “Compute engine” under the “COMPUTE” section. Click on your server name and then click “EDIT” on top of the page.

In the “Network tags” section add the tag of the firewall rule you’ve created before:

Add a firewall rule to the server

I would also highly recommend that you set up SSH keys so you can securely connect to your server!

Follow this link on setting up SSH with Bitnami

Important! Set your SSH user as “bitnami”

Click “Save” on the bottom of the page, and your server should now be ready for the fun stuff!