Of all the new releases announced at AWS re:Invent, I was most excited about Amazon Lightsail. I love AWS, but sometimes it’s too complicated. If someone wants to run a blog, then they shouldn’t have to learn about VPCs, subnets, etc…. they should, in a few clicks, be up and running.
So, I spent a few hour this weekend migrating this blog from the t2.small EC2 instance I’ve been running (with RDS and Memcache) to a new, smaller Lightsail instance.
The migration was straight forward (instructions here: https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/how-to/migrate-wordpress)- the biggest challenge was re-installing my WordPress plugins (they did not migrate over).
Will this be better than running my own VPC and EC2 instance? I’m not sure. I still have my old instances available if I need to switch back. I’m hoping that it does; I was spending about $20 a month running my t2.small (I know, I know.. I should have been running on an RI to reduce cost). The small instance of Lightsail is on $5/month.
How do you like using amazon lightsail? what is it costing you each month in reality?
I am looking for a new hoster for a wordpress site where i can have https, static IP, secure the wp-admin and not worry about getting throttled as i did with godaddy after being targeted by hackers.
I love it. I an spending about $5/month (for the smallest size). I find that it suits my needs (my sites doesn’t have a lot of traffic, so I don’t need anything bigger). I used to manage my own site on an EC2 instance, but it was just too much headache (too many crashes, too much server admin). Https isn’t available out of the box; you have to enable that separately. Besides that, it sounds like it might fit your needs. AWS was offering the first month free for a while…. so maybe you can use that to validate that it works for you.