If the server side technology you are planning to use is PHP then you might want to have a look at Google App Engine. It's probably the easiest option to get you started without being bogged down with the jargon: Here are a few steps to get you going:
- Head over to the App Engine PHP 'Hello world in 5 mins' page, have a quick read
- Download and install the Google App Engine SDK for PHP.
- Head over to Github and download the hello world PHP app.
- Add your static resources like HTML, CSS & JavaScript to the hello world app.
- Remove the
helloworld.php and edit the app.yaml and remove the handlers section, the update application with your app name (e.g. my-static-app).
- Create a project on the Google Cloud Console (e.g. my-static-app) and deploy your app as explained here.
Now you've got a static Website running on App Engine and accessible using a URL in the format http://my-static-app.appspot.com.
Bear in mind App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). So you just create your app and deploy it without having to worry about the server or its setup, etc... If your app is primarily made up of static resources like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images then Google will cache and serve these from separate content delivery edge servers. So you don't have to worry about any scalability for these static resource even if your traffic grows.
For dynamic resources like PHP scripts then these are served using App Engine instances and as your demand grow you can configure your app to use more App Engine instances as explained here.
With App Engine you can't FTP files to the server you need to use the SDK to upload your code by issuing a simple command:
appcfg.py update myapp/
