Creating a Website in Amazon Lightsail for ~4 Bucks

I have written before about my migration from Blogger to an Amazon EC2 instance and it was recieved very well by readers.  The EC2 instance costs me about 12 bucks a month to run 24/7.  It is not bad as long you guys click an affiliate link or google ad every so often. Those generous clicks will normally cover the cost of running the server that is hosting this blog.  This time around, I am experimenting with another interesting Amazon option.  Amazon Lightsail.

Amazon Lightsail is a service by Amazon that is very similar to the EC2 cloud except more prepackaged.  While the EC2 instances are very much pay as you consume resources, the Lightsail instances are more of a flat fee packaged cost.  For smaller websites and development efforts, this can be a really great way to be up and running without having to worry much about increasing costs or resource consumption.   Most of the initial options are cheaper than the smallest EC2 options at under 10 bucks.

Here’s a quick run through of the process of creating a quick WordPress server with a static IP assigned to it.

And that’s it.    It’s really that easy to get a small web server up and running in Amazon Lightsail.  Total cost for month 2 (month 1 will be free) will be $3.50.  You really can’t beat that.

There are some interesting limitations to the Lightsail program though currently.  It seems as though you are limited to just 20 instances and only 5 static IPs so effectively, 5 live websites at any given time.  I’m hoping this restriction will be lifted as time progresses though.  For now, that is enough for me to get my feet wet in the AWS world without breaking the bank.  As you site scales up and needs more resources, it will be very easy to move your instance to an EC2 instance. 

Happy Cloud Computing!
–CARLO