Providers / AWS Lightsail
AWS Lightsail
AWS without the bill anxiety: flat-price VPS bundles.
aws.amazon.com · Prices checked 2026-08-06
- Type
- Virtual server (VPS)
- Starting cost
- ≈$5/mo
- Free tier
- Yes
- Ease of use
- 3/5
Lightsail is the corner of AWS built for exactly this site’s audience: fixed-price VPS bundles from $5/month that include compute, SSD, and a real transfer allowance, plus a $15/month managed database. We cover Lightsail rather than EC2 because EC2’s à la carte pricing is the thing indie projects come to Lightsail to escape. If you outgrow it, the rest of AWS is one snapshot away.
Good to know
- Stopped instances bill at the full rate — only deleting an instance (snapshot first, $0.05/GB-month) stops charges.
- Transfer overage costs $0.09/GB in US/EU regions, and some regions (Mumbai, Sydney, São Paulo…) include only half the listed allowance.
- The new-account AWS Free plan expires after 6 months or when credits run out, then the account auto-closes with a 90-day grace period.
- Outgrowing Lightsail means migrating to EC2 — a real project, not a plan toggle.
Virtual server (VPS)
AWS Lightsail
- Best for
- Projects that want predictable AWS — a fixed-price server with a clear upgrade path into the wider AWS ecosystem.
- How deploys work
- Pick a blueprint (WordPress, LAMP, Node.js, plain Linux), get SSH in the browser or your terminal, and manage it like any VPS.
- The tradeoff
- Costs more per spec than the European VPS crowd, and stopped instances keep billing.
Why pick it
- Flat bundle pricing — the AWS product people actually recommend to escape surprise bills.
- 90-day free trial on the small bundles plus new-account credits.
- One-click blueprints, browser SSH, and a $15 managed database make it the easiest VPS here to start on.
- Snapshots restore to a bigger bundle in minutes, and the whole AWS ecosystem sits next door.
Why look elsewhere
- Stopped instances bill at full rate — deletion is the only off switch.
- Per-spec pricing loses to Hetzner, Netcup, and Contabo, and transfer overage is $0.09/GB.
- No autoscaling, no deploy pipeline — it is still a VPS you administer.
- Growing past Lightsail means a genuine migration to EC2.
Our ratings
What developers say
First-person reports from the past three years, drawn from public discussions and independent write-ups. These are individual experiences, not our ratings; open the original source for its workload and full context. Critical reports include a follow-up check so you can see whether the problem was fixed, partly addressed, remains current, or has no public resolution.
What people like 10 sources
A WordPress operator reports roughly 400 days of uptime, fast performance on an 8 GB instance, reliable snapshots, and no need to contact support.
How is Lightsail for WordPress?An operator running three WordPress sites says Lightsail was almost as easy as dedicated WordPress hosting, snapshots worked well, and the low monthly cost was reasonable.
I feel like an idiot for paying two years upfront for a WordPress site while AWS free tier would doCommunity operators describe Lightsail as AWS's straightforward website-hosting option with predictable flat pricing and report that it works well.
Hosting a website over AWS and pricingA hands-on respondent strongly recommends Lightsail for WordPress and highlights its inexpensive managed database snapshots; another calls Lightsail with Plesk a great fit.
Migration of 25 static websites to AWSAn amateur operator says several years of hosting WordPress, Moodle, and Nextcloud on Lightsail with Plesk have been satisfactory and easy to manage.
Lightsail Plesk migrationA two-year Lightsail user describes the service as straightforward and convenient for a small website before asking how to tune a recently slower entry-level instance.
Intermittent website performance — what am I doing wrong?Experienced users recommend Lightsail as a great, low-complexity tool for getting a small WordPress site running without an enterprise reference architecture.
Is the AWS WordPress reference architecture overkill for a small site?For several low-traffic nonprofit WordPress sites, community advice favors Lightsail because it abstracts server setup and suits the production workload.
AWS Lightsail questionCommunity members recommend Lightsail multisite for WordPress and characterize it as a very inexpensive option likely to serve modest hosting needs for a long time.
Hosting WordPress on AWSA web-hosting operator with four years across Lightsail and other AWS services says the recurring work now feels easy and is looking for more challenging AWS areas.
AWS novice — where to go from here?Critical reports and follow-ups 10 sources
A 2 GB Lightsail instance hosting Ghost and Plausible became extremely slow and often failed to accept SSH despite dashboard metrics appearing sustainable.
Lightsail instance is seemingly running out of resources when it shouldn'tOperators warn that sustained cPanel workloads can exhaust Lightsail CPU burst capacity and slow hosted sites, making it unsuitable for general hosting resale.
Anyone use AWS Lightsail for WHM/cPanel solutions?A WooCommerce operator reports roughly 1.5-second response times on a 4 GB Lightsail instance despite caching and a CDN and considers leaving for faster hosting.
Would migrating from AWS Lightsail WooCommerce to A2 Hosting be a great solution?A hands-on assessment says low-tier Lightsail WordPress instances can become slow or unreachable after CPU burst credits are consumed, especially for dynamic sites and traffic spikes.
Amazon Lightsail too slow for WordPress?A customer reports a Lightsail bill abruptly doubling from its usual range without an identifiable explanation in the post.
Lightsail bill unexpectedly doubledA container user says identical deployments regularly fail on the first or second attempt even though logs and resource metrics match the working revision.
Latest Lightsail deployment failing despite same logs as the active deploymentA customer in good standing was assigned a zero-instance quota and waited days for a basic Lightsail quota increase before deciding to use Azure instead.
Is there any way to start using Lightsail faster?A WooCommerce owner measured a checkout roughly 30 seconds faster on managed shared hosting than on the tested Lightsail setup and preferred developing over server administration.
Migrate to KnownHost or stay in AWS LightsailAfter installing a Let's Encrypt certificate, a WordPress site on a 2 GB Lightsail instance became reachable only briefly after each reboot; another operator reported similar behavior.
Lightsail website does not connect after SSL installationA Windows Lightsail user reports unexplained instance reboots that stop running processes and prevent a scheduled task from restarting until login.
AWS Lightsail rebootsVirtual server (VPS)
AWS Lightsail
90-day free trial (750 hours/month) on the $5–$12 Linux bundles and the $15 database, plus $100–$200 in new-account AWS credits.
What you'd realistically pay
| Project stage | Estimate | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Just starting | ≈$5/mo | Nano — 2 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB transfer. $3.50 as IPv6-only. Free for the first 90 days. |
| Steady traffic | ≈$12/mo | Small — 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, 3 TB transfer. |
| Growing | ≈$39/mo | Medium + managed database — $24 Medium (4 GB RAM, 4 TB transfer) plus the $15 managed MySQL/PostgreSQL bundle. |
Published prices
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Nano | $5/mo | 2 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB transfer. $3.50/month as IPv6-only. |
| Micro | $7/mo | 2 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer. |
| Small | $12/mo | 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, 3 TB transfer. |
| Medium | $24/mo | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 4 TB transfer. |
| Managed database | $15/mo | MySQL or PostgreSQL: 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 100 GB transfer. High availability doubles the price. |
- Billed hourly up to the monthly cap — partial months cost less, but stopped instances still bill.
- IPv6-only bundles are 20–30% cheaper; an unattached static IPv4 costs ~$3.60/month.
- Bundles scale up to 64 vCPU / 256 GB RAM ($1,764/month), with compute- and memory-optimized variants.
Deploy workflow
| Deploy from Git push Connect a repository and every push deploys automatically. | No No deploy pipeline — bring your own CI or scripts. |
|---|---|
| Preview deploys Each branch or pull request gets its own temporary URL. | No Nothing built in. |
| Official CLI A maintained command-line tool for deploys and management. | Yes The AWS CLI covers Lightsail end to end. |
| Instant rollbacks Revert to a previous deploy without rebuilding. | Partial Snapshots restore machines ($0.05/GB-month); no deploy-level rollback. |
Platform
| Custom domains + HTTPS Bring your own domain with TLS certificates handled. | Yes Lightsail DNS zones are included; TLS is yours via certbot or a Lightsail distribution. |
|---|---|
| Built-in CDN / edge network Static assets served from locations near your visitors. | Yes Lightsail distributions add a CloudFront-backed CDN from $2.50/month (first year of 50 GB/month free). |
| Serverless functions Run backend code without managing a server process. | No Not in Lightsail — that is the wider AWS (Lambda), with the à la carte billing this product avoids. |
| Docker containers Deploy your own container image. | Yes Install Docker on any instance, or use the Lightsail container service from $7/month. |
| SSH / shell access Open a shell on the machine running your app. | Yes Full root SSH, including a browser-based terminal. |
| EU hosting region Run the app itself in a European data center. | Yes Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm, and Spain. |
Runtime & operations
| Automatic scaling Capacity grows with traffic without manual resizing. | No No autoscaling — resize by restoring a snapshot to a bigger bundle. |
|---|---|
| Scale to zero Costs stop (or pause) when nobody is using the app. | No Stopped instances bill at full rate; only deletion stops charges. |
| Scheduled jobs Run code on a schedule without an external trigger. | Yes Classic cron on the box. |
| Managed database A database the provider runs, backs up, and updates. | Yes Managed MySQL/PostgreSQL bundles from $15/month. |
| Logs & metrics built in See what the app is doing without wiring up third parties. | Partial Instance metrics and alarms in the console; deeper monitoring means CloudWatch or your own stack. |
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