Amazon had announced Lightsail as an addition to the Compute lineup of services back in 2016 but not many developers are aware of it as the Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2 is more popular. Not only is EC2 more popular, it could feel complex and overwhelming for some developers who are used to traditional infrastructure or new to the scene.
Lightsail allows you to launch your own virtual private servers with SSD-based storage in several locations around the world for a low fixed fee per month or in our case free. Your instance could run a vanilla OS or pre-configured application like WordPress, LAMP or Magento. The interface is straightforward and lists all the options available.
As you might be aware, AWS offers several services under a free tier for which you are not billed, and you end up paying only when you exceed the free tier allowance. Out of curiosity, we created a new instance on Lightsail in the Mumbai region and setup a WordPress powered website. The basic instance comes with 1 vCPU,512MB RAM and 20GB SSD storage which is quite generous for someone who is getting started with cloud computing or even a small personal website or company website. The cost for this instance is $5 per month at present but we have never paid a single cent till date on this instance as you can see in the screenshot below.
