Amazon’s Virtual Private Server: Amazon Lightsail!

Amazon Lightsail (part of AWS, which stands for Amazon Web Services) was founded in 2016. It is a subsidiary of Amazon. Its goal is to supply all-in-one and simple-to-use virtual private servers (VPS) to everyone who needs them and wherever they are.

There are 80 availability zones spread throughout 25 distinct geographic regions including three in the United States (Virginia, Ohio, and Oregon). One in central Canada, five in Europe (two each in the UK, Germany, France, and Sweden). Five in Asia-Pacific (Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and India). AWS also announced plans to expand to 15 more availability zones across five geographies, including Australia, Indonesia, India, Spain, and Switzerland.

The website for Amazon Lightsail is simple in style but not without appeal. With its familiar style and a wealth of information scattered throughout the site, you’ll have no trouble finding the right option for your needs. The site is fully translated into 15 different languages in addition to English.

There is also an official blog, which makes up for its lack of beauty with usefulness, quality writing, and the excitement with which it releases fresh content, often daily.

Amazon Lightsail maintains many social networking profiles, including Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube, though with less zeal. As a result, if you’re a fellow user, be sure to look them up.

You may also listen to AWS podcasts for developers and IT professionals interested in learning about the latest news and developments in storage, security, infrastructure, serverless computing, and other topics.

Amazon Lightsail Plans and costs

Amazon Lightsail hosting plans, like many others of similar grade, invoice on an on-demand hourly basis, so you only pay for what you use. You charge a predetermined hourly fee for each of their plans that you want to use. This can only go up to the maximum monthly plan cost.

The most cost-effective Amazon Lightsail option is $3.50 a month (with Linux/Unix). It also provides 512 MB of memory, 1 core processor, up to 20GB of SSD storage, and 1TB of data throughput (the limit is lower in Indian and Australian region at 0.5 TB).

There is no money-back guarantee, as one might assume. But you can discontinue Amazon Lightsail’s services at any moment and only pay for what you’ve used so far.

All major credit cards, ACH direct debit (for clients in the United States), and SEPA direct debit accepted by Amazon Lightsail (for customers from Europe). PayPal is strangely unavailable (much to the chagrin of a few of their users).

Fast Setup

It merely takes a few clicks to set up a new VPS for WordPress, Gitlab, or even a pure OS like Ubuntu 16.04 – no long wait times, no DevOps skills required. In a matter of minutes, your server will be up and running. Simple and trustworthy.

Are you unsure if you’ll enjoy it? For a month, you may try Lightsail for free. It won’t take up much of your time to give it a try.

Amazon Lightsail User friendliness

You’ll need to create an AWS account or log in if you already have one get started with Amazon Lightsail. What’s more, by joining up, you’ll receive a complete year of free tier access. This includes a one-month free trial of Amazon Lightsail’s hosting packages (both Linux and Windows).

The process of creating an AWS account goes as easily as possible. This takes a little longer and requires a little more personal information and engagement than one might think. This contains your entire name, home address, phone number, postal code, and payment information, among other things. You’ll also have to validate your identification by cell phone verification. You can choose between a text message and a voice call.

After that, you can choose a hosting plan. And if you want to take advantage of their free trial before committing, you’ll have to go with the most basic option.

The Amazon Lightsail interface strip down to its most basic form, making it attractive, simple, and extremely user-friendly. All you have to do now is click “Create instance” and fill in the blanks with information about your virtual server. Picking a location (the closest one marks), opting between Linux/Unix and Microsoft Windows. Decide if you want software includes, and which ones you want pre-install and configures for you are just a few of the options.

If you wish to create a WordPress site, this is where you should put a checkmark to make things easy for yourself. On Ubuntu, you can choose between LAMP, Joomla, Magento, MEAN, Node.js, Nginx, Drupal, GitLab CE, Redmine, Nginx, and Plesk Hosting Stacks in addition to WordPress. You may also add a launch script, modify your SSH key pair, and set up automatic snapshots (point-in-time backups).

Amazon Lightsail Performance and experience

We found it realistic to expect lightning-fast performance given the number of worldwide data centers Amazon Lightsail offers and the availability of solid-state drives and resources.

The page loaded in 2.6 seconds, and practically all of the important web metrics were in the green zone, meaning they were significantly higher than the average. Total blocking time (the amount of time blocked by scripts throughout the page loading process) was, on the other hand, a complete disaster, needing 665 milliseconds when the ideal number should be 150 or less. Nonetheless, Gtmetrix gave AWS’ site a B (83 percent) for overall speed performance, which is one of the better ratings we’ve seen so far.

When it comes to uptime, Amazon Lightsail offers a 99.99 percent guarantee supported by a service level agreement (SLA). It states that all of their users are eligible for payment ranging from 10% to 100%. Depending on the amount of downtime their site experienced during the month in question. To test this, we used UptimeRobot to track the uptime of AWS‘ main site for a month. But our efforts were (thankfully) in vain, as we failed to record any downtime.

Support

If you get stuck and want to be self-sufficient, the first place to look is AWS’ knowledgebase, documentation center, FAQ area (for trivial problems), and community forum. Despite the fact that the knowledgebase and documentation are both well on both intriguing and easy-to-understand stuff, finding your way around can be a chore.

Amazon Lightsail’s support team can contact by support ticket, and they normally respond within 24 hours. You’re out of luck if you use Amazon Lightsail’s cheapest plan; support divide into four levels (Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise), and you’ll have to upgrade to a more expensive plan to get more help channels. You’ll be fed with your team of advisors, which includes a technical account manager, short-term infrastructure event management, proactive evaluations, in-depth guides, and so on if you’re willing to pay a king’s ransom.

Offers all languages on Amazon Lightsail’s website do not include round-the-clock telephone and chat support.

Effortless Management

We have to acknowledge that Amazon did an excellent job developing the Lightsail management panel. Accessing items like the Firewall, SSH connection settings, and Metrics is quite simple because of its outstanding UX. You’ll also get immediate server monitoring, so you won’t have to worry about your app or website being down without your awareness.

You’ll save money on administration work, and your developers please because any necessary activities are complete swiftly. If you ask us, it’s a win-win situation.

Amazon Lightsail Competitors

Bluehost and Amazon Lightsail are both worth considering if you’re searching for a well-rounded VPS option. Bluehost offers three VPS plans (the cheapest of which is significantly more expensive than the cheapest option with Amazon Lightsail). A month-to-month billing, and a 30-day money-back guarantee, while Amazon Lightsail offers VPS plans ranging from $3.50 to $160, easy upgrade/downgrade, hourly billing, and a free trial.

HostGator, like Bluehost, provides a wide range of hosting choices, options, and services, all with a beginner-friendly approach. However, the cheapest VPS package with Amazon Lightsail is comparable to shared hosting options with any of them in terms of pricing. As a result, Amazon Lightsail is a top choice. If you’re looking for a low-cost VPS option, have some experience, and don’t mind getting your hands dirty. If that isn’t the case, Bluehost or HostGator are better options.

DigitalOcean, like Amazon Lightsail, is best suited for tech-savvy consumers who can live with “non-existent” customer service to install cloud infrastructure without breaking the bank. Both offer free trials, allowing you to test everything out before committing to one of them.

Conclusion

Amazon Lightsail is available to anyone who wants to learn more about cloud hosting or become connected to the AWS ecosystem. Although their VPS hosting solutions are easy to set up and scale to meet most demands. Individuals looking to construct mission-critical, high-performance websites should keep their choices open for the time being.

We also urge beginners on a tight budget to do the same. Because Amazon Lightsail’s personnel won’t try to lavish you with helpful advice unless you’re willing to pay top cash. Fortunately, there is a 30-day free trial, so you can set up your instance, install it. All of the apps you want, and see how everything works before you spend your hard-earned money.

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