Amazon Lightsail Review

Features and Usability

Features not included in the VPS price are marked as missing below.

Last updated on January 29 2017.

Feature Value Comment
Hourly Billing  Yes
DDOS Protection  No

No DDoS protection by default.
DDoS protection available from AWS shield: https://aws.amazon.com/shield/
Backups  No

Snapshots are available for a fee:
"Lightsail snapshots cost $0.05/GB-month. That means if you take a snapshot of your 30 GB SSD instance and keep it for a month, you pay $1.50 at the end of the month. "
Control Panel  custom
SSH Keys Setup  Yes
Total Number of Datacenters  4
Number of Datacenter Continents  1
Monitoring Charts  Yes

CPU, Network In, Network Out, Status checks.
Admin REST API  Yes

URL: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/2016-11-28/api-reference/Welcome.html
Upgrade VPS from admin console  No
Mobile Friendly UI  No
Reverse DNS  No

No visible option to set the reverse DNS, even for a static IP.
Accepted Forms of Payment  Credit cards
Hidden CPU Model  No
Affiliate Program  No

In VpsBenchmark's opinion

Feature Value Comment
UI Friendliness 

Options are stripped down to a minimum. It's very easy to get started.
Quality of Service 
  • Lightsail only offers the choice between 4 availability zones in the same datacenter (Virginia).
  • SSH keys from AWS can't be used in Lightsail.
Compare Features from all Providers

Amazon Lightsail Extra Services

In addition to features included in the VPS plan, Amazon Lightsail also offers the following services (possibly for a fee):

Backups   Block Storage   Object Storage Load Balancer   Floating Ips
Teams Datastores Serverless Ddos Protection

Admin UI Screenshots

Amazon Lightsail Plans


Plan Specifications

Url https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
Cost Per Month $5.0
Hourly Billing true
Memory Gb 1.0
Disk Gb 40
Data Transfer Gb 2000
Num Cores 1
Virtualization Xen
Burstable
Per core CPU allocation: 10%

Plan Grades

Grades are calculated by combining results from web, sysbench, endurance and remote timing tests.

Grade A is best, grade F is worst.

Follow the letter links to find the test results backing the grade.

How are grades calculated?

Web Performance Raw CPU Power Performance Stability Disk IO Performance Network Performance
B F E E C

Performance Test Results

We conducted 5 different types of tests for Amazon Lightsail - 1GB 1core. Review the results and compare this plan to its competitors.

Web Test Sysbench Test Remote Timing Test Endurance Test Network Transfers
Review Review Review Review Review
Compare Compare Compare Compare Compare

Web Test Results

This plan was tested 5 times at vpsbenchmarks.com. The table below shows all trials run on the 1GB 1core plan and the web response times for every one of those.

Start of Trial Avg response time P95 response time Avg DB time
Sep 06 2018 58ms 105ms 9ms
Apr 19 2018 59ms 100ms 10ms
Jul 30 2017 66ms 117ms 15ms
Jul 23 2017 59ms 107ms 12ms
Dec 03 2016 156ms 770ms 25ms

Plan Specifications

Url https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
Cost Per Month $10.0
Hourly Billing true
Memory Gb 2.0
Disk Gb 60
Data Transfer Gb 3000
Num Cores 1
Virtualization Xen
Burstable
Per core CPU allocation: 25%

Plan Grades

Grades are calculated by combining results from web, sysbench, endurance and remote timing tests.

Grade A is best, grade F is worst.

Follow the letter links to find the test results backing the grade.

How are grades calculated?

Web Performance Raw CPU Power Performance Stability Disk IO Performance Network Performance
A F C C C

Performance Test Results

We conducted 5 different types of tests for Amazon Lightsail - 2GB 1core. Review the results and compare this plan to its competitors.

Web Test Sysbench Test Remote Timing Test Endurance Test Network Transfers
Review Review Review Review Review
Compare Compare Compare Compare Compare

Web Test Results

This plan was tested 3 times at vpsbenchmarks.com. The table below shows all trials run on the 2GB 1core plan and the web response times for every one of those.

Start of Trial Avg response time P95 response time Avg DB time
Jun 28 2018 52ms 96ms 4ms
Oct 21 2017 53ms 100ms 3ms
Jan 29 2017 48ms 89ms 3ms

Plan Specifications

Url https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
Cost Per Month $20.0
Hourly Billing true
Memory Gb 4.0
Disk Gb 80
Data Transfer Gb 4000
Num Cores 2
Virtualization Zen
Burstable
Per core CPU allocation: 35%

Plan Grades

Grades are calculated by combining results from web, sysbench, endurance and remote timing tests.

Grade A is best, grade F is worst.

Follow the letter links to find the test results backing the grade.

How are grades calculated?

Web Performance Raw CPU Power Performance Stability Disk IO Performance Network Performance
A D C C B

Performance Test Results

We conducted 5 different types of tests for Amazon Lightsail - 4GB 2cores. Review the results and compare this plan to its competitors.

Web Test Sysbench Test Remote Timing Test Endurance Test Network Transfers
Review Review Review Review Review
Compare Compare Compare Compare Compare

Web Test Results

This plan was tested 1 times at vpsbenchmarks.com. The table below shows all trials run on the 4GB 2cores plan and the web response times for every one of those.

Start of Trial Avg response time P95 response time Avg DB time
Jun 07 2018 46ms 76ms 3ms

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