Amazon Lightsail Review
Amazon Lightsail was founded in 2016.
It is headquartered in the USA.
It offers VPS hosting products.
- Australia
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- India
- Ireland
- Japan
- Singapore
- South Korea
- United Kingdom
- United States
This provider is related to Amazon EC2
EC2 is the full featured cloud offering from Amazon
Quick Links
| Amazon Lightsail plans specs and prices | Plans |
| Amazon Lightsail instance types | Instance Types |
| How fast are Amazon Lightsail servers? Check them out in the Screener | Screener |
| List of Amazon Lightsail trials | Trials |
| Review CPU models found in Amazon Lightsail trials | CPUs |
| Performance variations of Amazon Lightsail VPS over the long term | Consistency |
| List of Amazon Lightsail yabs.sh results | Yabs |
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. |
| Backups | No |
Snapshots are available for a fee: |
| 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. |
| Shelving | No |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 45s | 15s | 60s | 3 |
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 | https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/#Billing_and_account_management | |
| Block | $0.100 | https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/faq/#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
https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
|
$0.090/GB |
Amazon Lightsail Instance Types and 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. |
|||
| 1GB 1core | 1 | 1.0GB | 40GB | $5.00 / month |
| 2GB 1core | 1 | 2.0GB | 60GB | $10.00 / month |
| 4GB 2cores | 2 | 4.0GB | 80GB | $20.00 / month |
| 8GB 2cores | 2 | 8.0GB | 160GB | $40.00 / month |