Stay away from Lightsail
September 14, 2021

Stay away from Lightsail

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Lightsail

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.
  • 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
  • simplicity
  • ease of use
  • quickness to get started
  • Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
  • Saved lots of time for our prototyping
  • Other VPS providers are better
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.

Do you think Amazon Lightsail delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Amazon Lightsail's feature set?

No

Did Amazon Lightsail live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Amazon Lightsail go as expected?

No

Would you buy Amazon Lightsail again?

No

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.

Amazon Lightsail Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
1
Pre-configured templates
7
Monitoring tools
5
Pre-defined machine images
6
Operating system support
8
Security controls
5
Automation
8