Amazon Lightsail (part of AWS, which is short for Amazon Web Services) started in 2016 and (as the name suggests) is a subsidiary of Amazon, a multinational technology company in the United States. In addition to being a giant in the market, their goal is to provide easy-to-use, all-in-one Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to anyone who needs them and wherever they are, in a nutshell. The company is headquartered in the United States, though it has offices and (more importantly) data centers around the world. These include 80 Availability Zones in 25 different geographic regions, including three locations in the United States (Virginia, Ohio, and Oregon), one in central Canada, five in Europe (two in the United Kingdom, and one each in Germany, France, and Sweden). ) and five in Asia-Pacific (Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India). AWS also announced plans to expand to an additional 15 Availability Zones across 5 Regions and support greater coverage in Australia, Indonesia, India, Spain, and Switzerland. The Amazon Lightsail website is simple in design but not short on looks. With its familiar layout and a wealth of information spread throughout the site, it's easy to find the solution that best suits your needs. In addition to English, the site is fully translated into 15 different languages. There is also an official blog and what it lacks in terms of aesthetics it makes up for with informativeness, the quality of the writing and the enthusiasm with which it publishes new content, most of the time on a day-to-day basis. Although with a little less enthusiasm, Amazon Lightsail keeps several social media accounts alive, including Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. So if you are another user, be sure to check them out. Plus, you can follow AWS podcasts for developers and IT professionals looking for the latest news and trends in storage, security, infrastructure, serverless computing, and more.
Amazon offers a wide variety of VPS hosting plans for Linux and Windows (Image credit: Amazon)
Packages and prices
With many providers of the same caliber, Amazon Lightsail hosting plans are billed using an hourly, on-demand rate, and as a result, you only pay for what you use. For each of your plans you choose to use, you will be charged a fixed hourly price that can only go up to the plan's maximum monthly cost. The cheapest option with Amazon Lightsail will cost you €3.50 per month (with Linux/Unix) and includes 512 MB of memory, 1 central processor, up to 20 GB of hard disk space (SSD) and 1 TB of data transfer ( The limit is lower in the India and Australia region at 0,5TB). Currently, there are seven VPS plans of different sizes for Linux (ranging from €3.50 to €160 per month) and the same number for Windows (from €8 to €240 per month). Here you can also buy containers, managed databases, CDNs, load balancers, and block storage. Amazon Lightsail also offers a free trial with the cheapest plans for Linux and Windows, and they are good for 750 hours. However, be careful not to exceed the monthly limits, as that's when the word "free" will start to lose its meaning. In other words, you will have to pay according to the pay-as-you-go standard. service fees. As you'd expect, there's no money-back guarantee, but you can cancel Amazon Lightsail services at any time and only pay for past usage. Payment methods with Amazon Lightsail include all major credit cards, ACH direct debit (for US customers), and SEPA direct debit (for European customers). Oddly enough (and much to the chagrin of several of its users), PayPal is not available.
Ease of use
To start your story with Amazon Lightsail, you'll need to create your AWS account or sign in if you already have one. The bottom line is that when you sign up, you can get a full year of free tier access that includes a free trial of Amazon Lightsail hosting packages (for both Linux and Windows) for a period of one month. Creating an AWS account is as simple as possible, although it will take some time and a bit more personal information and input than you might expect. This includes providing your full name, address, telephone number, postal code, all payment details, etc. You'll also need to confirm your identity through cell phone verification, where you can choose between a text message and a voice call. After that, you can finally choose a hosting plan and if you want to use their free trial before committing further, you'll have to go with a basic plan.
You can create a Linux or Windows instance and configure it with a CMS or other applications (Image credit: Amazon) Amazon Lightsail's interface is stripped down to the simplest form, and as a result, it's attractive, intuitive, and incredibly easy to use. . All you need to do is click "Create Instance" and decide your virtual server details. Il s'agit notamment de choisir un emplacement (le plus proche sera marqué), de faire un choix entre Linux/Unix et Microsoft Windows, de decide si vous souhaitez include des applications et lesquelles de celles-ci vous souhaitez être préinstallées et configurées pour you. If you want to create a WordPress site, this is where you can tag it for your convenience. In addition to WordPress, you can choose from LAMP, Joomla, Magento, MEAN, Node.js, Nginx, Durpal, GitLab CE, Redmine, Nginx, and the Plesk Hosting Stack on Ubuntu. Additionally, you can add a startup script, change your SSH key pair, or add automatic snapshots (one-time backups). In conclusion, you will name your instance, click "create" and wait a bit before your server is ready for action. Sophisticated users will probably find everything from now on as simple as anything, however there are some basic things that anyone can have trouble with, such as reporting your domain name to the server. If your domain is not managed by Amazon, this can be done. it can be even more complicated. If you suddenly feel the need to upgrade your plan to a more ambitious plan (or quite the opposite), Amazon Lightsail has made that process quite easy, and there are (thankfully) enough guides to make things even easier.
We use GTmetrix to test the uptime and response time of the Amazon Lightsail main site (Image credit: GTmetrix)
Speed and experience
With the number of global data centers provided by Amazon Lightsail and the availability of SSDs and resources, we think it's reasonable to expect blazing-fast performance. After testing the speed of the main AWS site (via Gtmetrix), we found that we were right to think so. The page fully loaded in 2.6 seconds (average score was 8.1) and almost all of the vital web metrics were in the green zone, which is roughly above the average score. However, the total block time (or the time blocked by the scripts during the page load process) was an absolute disaster, requiring 665 milliseconds, while the recommended amount would have to be 150 or less. Nonetheless, Gtmetrix rated AWS's overall site speed performance a B (83%), which is one of the best results we've seen so far. When it comes to uptime, Amazon Lightsail offers an SLA-backed 99,99% guarantee. According to her, all of her users are entitled to be compensated from 10% to 100% based on the downtime suffered by their site during the month in question. To test this, we monitored the uptime of the main AWS site (via UptimeRobot) for a whole month, but all our efforts were (thankfully) in vain as we didn't experience any downtime.
The Amazon Lightsail Resource Center has a number of helpful guides and tutorials to get you started (Image credit: Amazon)
Support
If you find yourself stuck and want to stay on your own, your first choice will be the AWS knowledge base, information center, FAQ (for simpler issues), or your community forum. The knowledge base and documentation are also equipped with informative and easy-to-follow articles; however, finding your way around can seem like an arduous task. As for the Amazon Lightsail support staff, they can be contacted via a support ticket where they tend to respond within 24 hours. If you are a user of the cheapest Amazon Lightsail plan, that's it, as their support is divided into four levels (Basic, Developer, Commercial and Enterprise) and to get more support channels you have to purchase more expensive plans. So, if you're willing to pay a king's ransom, you'll be treated like the proverbial king by getting your own advisors, including a technical account manager, short-term infrastructure event management, proactive reviews, step-by-step guides, etc. . 24-hour chat and phone support (included in more expensive plans) is not included in all supported languages on the Amazon Lightsail website.
Competition
Those looking for a complete VPS solution will find both Bluehost and Amazon Lightsail worth considering. Amazon Lightsail offers VPS plans ranging from $3.50 to $160, easy upgrade/downgrade, hourly billing, and a free trial, while Bluehost offers three VPS plans (where their cheapest option is considerably more expensive than their cheapest with Amazon). Lightsail), month by month. Monthly billing and 30-day money-back guarantee. Like Bluehost, HostGator offers a variety of hosting types, options, and features, all with a very newbie-friendly approach. However, in terms of price, the cheapest VPS plan with Amazon Lightsail is comparable to shared hosting solutions with either. So if you're looking for a cheap and cheerful VPS solution, you're experienced and don't mind getting your hands dirty, Amazon Lightsail is the number one choice. If not, it's better to use Bluehost or HostGator. Like Amazon Lightsail, DigitalOcean is best suited for tech-savvy users who may face "non-existent" customer support, so...