Amazon Lightsail Review

Lightsail

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Amazon Lightsail was founded as a VPS provider in 2016.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS hosting products.

It has datacenters in:
  • Australia
  • Canada
  • France
  • Germany
  • India
  • Ireland
  • Japan
  • Singapore
  • South Korea
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Best VPS Awards

2nd Best VPS May 2019

This provider is related to Amazon EC2

EC2 is the full featured cloud offering from Amazon


Quick Links


Amazon Lightsail VPS Features

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

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  13
Number of Datacenter Continents  4
Monitoring Charts  Yes

CPU usage, CPU burst capacity.

Admin REST API  Yes
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
Firewall  Yes

Under networking.
SSH and HTTP are open by default. HTTPS is closed.

Shelving  No
Compare Features

Pros and Cons

Strengths

  • Significantly lower prices than EC2.
  • Large choice of datacenter locations.
  • Access to a subset of AWS services.

Weaknesses

  • Instances are throttled if you push them too hard.

Amazon Lightsail Extra Services

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

Backups   Block storage   Object storage Load balancer  
Floating IP addresses Team Management Managed databases   Serverless
DDoS protection Kubernetes GPU instances Private network

VPS Instance Provisioning Time

For each Amazon Lightsail VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.

See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.

Average Provisioning Time Min Provisioning Time Max Provisioning Time Number of VPS Samples
50s 40s 60s 2

Control Panel Screenshots


Cloud Storage Prices

For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.

Storage Type Price / GB / month Description Restriction
Snapshots $0.050 Amazon Lightsail snapshots storage
Block $0.100 Amazon Lightsail block storage

Network Bandwidth Prices

These are the network bandwidth prices charged by Amazon Lightsail for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.

For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.

Description Price / GB
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged (the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 4 TB / month (for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Transfer pool: no
Amazon Lightsail networking
$0.090/GB

Amazon Lightsail Instance Types and Plans

How fast are Amazon Lightsail servers?
Screen all Amazon Lightsail VPS Plans

All Amazon Lightsail instance types

Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.

Plan Number of CPU cores RAM Storage Price
Family:
Single server line
Instance Type:
General purpose

Lightsail gets you started quickly with preconfigured Linux and Windows application stacks and an intuitive management console.
Focus on your code, not your bill. Lightsail bundles all the resources you need into a single, simple price.
Lightsail automatically configures networking, access, and security environments, taking the guesswork out of launching your server.

1GB 1core 1 1.0GB 40GB $5.00 / month
2GB 2cores 2 2.0GB 60GB $10.00 / month
4GB 2cores 2 4.0GB 80GB $20.00 / month
8GB 2cores 2 8.0GB 160GB $40.00 / month

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