Note it is not necessary to create a Google Cloud Account. You can use alternative providers like  Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Linode or providers that have dedicated hosting for Drupal - e.g. Pantheon and Acquia. However, if you do not have funds, a virtual machine on your local desktop can be a very good alternative. You can expect to spend anywhere between 2000 - 5000 rupees per month depending on the kind of service and platform you use. However, your existing IT infrastructure can be used to provision a virtual web-server which will provide all the required functionality without much additional cost. The total annual cost of hosting is variable, but for a recommended setup on external virtual private servers expect to spend between 12000 - 60000 rupees. Note that the cost of on-premises hosting in your own servers is variable and you can get an estimate if you check with your IT department. 
Setting up the Virtual Machine
We set up the aforementioned virtual machine with a boot disk of 50 GB persistent disk. To create a Virtual Machine Instance do the following steps:
  1. Go to the Google Cloud Platform Home page (https://cloud.google.com/).
  2. Click on Go to console button. 
  3.  In the page that opens there are various options available but to quickly create  virtual machine click on the hamburger menu on the top left and then go to the compute engine page
  4. It will take you to the virtual machine instances page (https://console.cloud.google.com/compute/instances) where you can add a virtual machine or view your existing virtual machines. If you have not done so then you have to create a cloud project and enable billing. 
  5. Click on the create virtual instance button on the top to create a virtual machine instance.
  6. Give an informative name (google gives the name instance - 1 as a default). Choose an informative name so that you can find your virtual machine easily later on. 
  7. Choose the appropriate vCPU and RAM configuration - we have chosen the n1-standard-1 machine which is alright for most modest usage sites. 
  8.  Choose the boot disk. The default is a Debian but clicking on the change button allows you to change the server OS. Note you can choose to deploy a Windows server if you desire. 
  9. We choose the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image for deployment. At this page increase the size of the boot disk to a more useful value from the default value of 10 GB. 
  10. Choose to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic by clicking on the checkboxes under the Firewall section. This will allow you to communicate to your website from the external IP address. Note that if you do not choose to keep these options you can have terminal access directly from the cloud console. 
  11. Google cloud shows you the approximate billing for the instance.