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Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail

Overview

What is Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) designed to present an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan.

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Recent Reviews
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Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Pre-configured templates (5)
    8.9
    89%
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (5)
    8.9
    89%
  • Pre-defined machine images (5)
    8.9
    89%
  • Monitoring tools (5)
    8.8
    88%
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Pricing

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512 MB Linux

$3.50

Cloud
per month

1 GB Linux

$5.00

Cloud
per month

2 GB Linux

$10.00

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

9.1
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) that supports a number of different use cases:

Simple web applications
Deploy a web application with pre-configured development stacks like LAMP, Nginx, MEAN, and Node.js.

Websites
Create and customize a blog, e-commerce, or personal website with Lightsail's pre-configured applications like WordPress, Magento, Plesk, and Joomla.

Business software
Run open source and commercial software, as Lightsail helps launch a line-of-business software, like file storage and sharing, backups, financial and accounting software.

Dev/test environments
Spin up a developer or test environment. Creating dev sandboxes and testing environments outside of production environments lets users test without the concern of breaking something.

Lightsail automatically configures networking, access, and security environments. Lightsail plans include a static IP address, DNS management, resource monitoring and alerting, remote access via SSH or RDP, and secure key management.

Amazon Lightsail Video

Amazon Lightsail Introduction

Amazon Lightsail Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) designed to present an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan.

Reviewers rate Operating system support and Automation highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Amazon Lightsail are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(20)

Reviews

(1-1 of 1)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 14, 2021

Stay away from Lightsail

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 1-10 employees
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use a Amazon Lightsail as a simple VPS provider as an alternative to Linode or Digital Ocean. Our systems hosted on Lightsail include apache websites, NodeJS applications, Python Flask applications as well as databases. Amazon lightsail is actually preconfigured EC2 instances and we use Lightsail instead of EC2 for its simplicity. The services provided by Lightsail is actually just a VPS - however, you need some AWS knowledge to be able to set up system metrics monitoring.
Pros and Cons
  • simple
  • easy to use
  • slow
  • complex integration to AWS Cloudwatch - complex setup required
  • No IPv6, a big downside
  • less value compared with Linode or Digital Ocean
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon Lightsail is great for beginners who just want a cheap VPS to experiment on things. It's particularly great if you're at a hack-a-thon and looking for a fast way to prototype a throw away project. I would never recommend Lightsail to any production applications. Lightsail has been unreliable in terms of uptime. Sometimes, the instance just randomly crashes or reboots. Amazon will perform maintenance on your Lightsail instance without warning. Networking on Lightsail is also not great - there is also no IPv6 support.
Most Important Features
  • simplicity
  • ease of use
  • quickness to get started
Amazon Lightsail Feature Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (7)
57.142857142857146%
5.7
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10%
1.0
Pre-configured templates
70%
7.0
Monitoring tools
50%
5.0
Pre-defined machine images
60%
6.0
Operating system support
80%
8.0
Security controls
50%
5.0
Automation
80%
8.0
Return on Investment
  • Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
  • Saved lots of time for our prototyping
  • Other VPS providers are better
Alternatives Considered
Linode and Digital Ocean are far more reliable than Amazon Lightsail. I would recommend against hosting any production applications in Lightsail. Even for prototyping, I would also suggest using the VPS provider of your choice for your production application because you can just scale that same VPS machine you used to prototype for production. Linode and Digital Ocean also has much better and fluid system monitoring experience.
Other Software Used
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