Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon&#x2F;AWS themselves, it isn&#x27;t a third party. That&#x27;s a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here.<p>One big &quot;gotcha&quot; for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling?<p>AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They&#x27;ll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing). But they&#x27;ve never offered a hard &quot;suspend my account&quot; ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for.<p>They claim this is a competitor for Digital Ocean, but with DO what they say they charge is what they actually charge. I&#x27;m already seeing looking through the FAQ various ways for this to exceed the supposed monthly charges listed on the homepage (and no way to stop that).<p>Why even offer a service like this if you cannot GUARANTEE that the $5 they say they charge is all you&#x27;ll ever get charged? How is this different from AWS if a $5 VPS can cost $50, or $500?<p>That&#x27;s what Amazon is missing. People want ironclad guarantees about how much this can cost under any and all circumstances. I&#x27;d welcome an account suspend instead of bill shock.

Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, VULTR and Linode.<p>Of course all things are not equal (i.e. CPUs, SSDs, bandwidth, etc).<p><pre><code> Provider: RAM, CPU Cores, Storage, Transfer ---------- $5&#x2F;mo LightSail: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB DO: 512MB, 1, 20GB SSD, 1TB VULTR: 768MB, 1, 15GB SSD, 1TB ---------- $10&#x2F;mo LightSail: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB DO: 1GB, 1, 30GB SSD, 2TB VULTR: 1GB, 1, 20GB SSD, 2TB Linode: 2GB, 1, 24GB SSD, 2TB ---------- $20&#x2F;mo LightSail: 2GB, 1, 40GB SSD, 3TB DO: 2GB, 2, 40GB SSD, 3TB VULTR: 2GB, 2, 45GB SSD, 3TB Linode: 4GB, 2, 48GB SSD, 3TB ---------- $40&#x2F;mo LightSail: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB DO: 4GB, 2, 60GB SSD, 4TB VULTR: 4GB, 4, 45GB SSD, 4TB Linode: 8GB, 4, 96GB SSD, 4TB ---------- $80&#x2F;mo LightSail: 8GB, 2, 80GB SSD, 5TB DO: 8GB, 4, 80GB SSD, 5TB VULTR: 8GB, 6, 150GB SSD, 5TB Linode: 12GB, 6, 192GB SSD, 8TB </code></pre> In an easier to read gist: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;637693650bc8bb9baadf6293a99e1813</a>

A compelling product. The dashboard looks great. They even replaced the confusing term &quot;user data&quot; with &quot;launch script&quot;, but they fall back into it later. SSH in-browser is great too and can be bookmarked&#x2F;opened in a fullscreen tab. Uploading (instead of pasting) your SSH pubkey is a bit annoying.<p>The docs appear to say you can add these to a VPC but I don&#x27;t see how to do it.<p>They don&#x27;t say the SSD storage is local, so I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s not.<p>A few runs with `fio` confirms this is EBS GP2 or slower:<p>The bench: &quot;fio --name=randrw --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=4G --rw=randrw --rwmixread=75 --gtod_reduce=1&quot;<p>Lightsail $5:<p><pre><code> read : io=3071.7MB, bw=9199.7KB&#x2F;s, iops=2299, runt=341902msec write: io=1024.4MB, bw=3067.1KB&#x2F;s, iops=766, runt=341902msec </code></pre> DigitalOcean $5:<p><pre><code> read : io=3071.7MB, bw=242700KB&#x2F;s, iops=60674, runt= 12960msec write: io=1024.4MB, bw=80935KB&#x2F;s, iops=20233, runt= 12960msec </code></pre> More than an order of magnitude difference in the storage subsystems.<p>These appear to just be t2.nano instances (CPU perf is good, E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40 GHz, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.primatelabs.com&#x2F;geekbench3&#x2F;8164581" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.primatelabs.com&#x2F;geekbench3&#x2F;8164581</a>).<p>For advanced users, there isn&#x27;t much compelling here to make up for the administration overhead. It&#x27;s a little cheaper than a similar-spec t2.nano (roughly $4.75 on-demand + $3 for a 30GB SSD). The real win is egress cost; you can transfer EC2-&gt;Lightsail for free. 1TB of egress would be nearly $90 on EC2, but is only $5 on Lightsail.<p>In other news, EC2 egress pricing is obviously ridiculous.

Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270&#x2F;mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15&#x2F;mo?<p>In total, I&#x27;m spending about $15,000&#x2F;yr on AWS, and someone spending $5&#x2F;mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn&#x27;t it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount?<p>I get enough headaches dealing with reserved instances, and trying to buy them at the correct time of the year to line up with price drops. Now, I need to consider dumping my autoscaling groups, EC2 web servers, and moving them to LightSail? Why not just give us a fair price on bandwidth, instead of more complications?

I&#x27;m amused by the model they have in their banner: a bearded, tattooed man wearing what appears to be a .. cape? We&#x27;ve come a long way since the stock photos of &#x27;smiling super-normal people wearing ties, huddled around a computer&#x27;.

This is a non-starter without IPv6. I know some of you will be tempted to jump ship from DO and Vultr, but please remember that by doing so you will continue enabling Amazon to hold back progress. While ignoring AWS is not really an option, as it offers some very unique features that are quite useful, this thing does not.<p>DO is not great in this regard as their butcher their allocations, but Vultr gives each VPS a proper &#x2F;64. Scaleway has partial IPv6 support (not for their bare metal could, but their VPS&#x27;s do support it).<p>I urge you to vote with your wallets, unless you really like paying $1&#x2F;month or more per IP for the foreseeable future.

Here is a comparison of $20 instances across DO, Linode and LightSail<p>All have 3TB transfer<p>Linode(Best): 4GB RAM, 2 Core, 48 GB SSD<p>DO: 2GB RAM, 2 Core, 40 GB SSD<p>LightSail(Worst): 2GB RAM, 1 Core, 40 GB SSD<p>I use this exact instance on Linode for my site <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictanote.co;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictanote.co;</a> that one extra core makes a lot of difference when you want to take a backup of db or something intensive like that.

Meanwhile, in France: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;</a><p>Same thing with OVH, you can get a powerful dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth for the price of a medium EC2 instance. I hope they will open their datacenter in California soon.

I think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror.<p>The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it&#x27;s easy to hook up to Amazon&#x27;s other services if you need to.

This is the first cheap bandwidth option I&#x27;ve seen on AWS. Transferring 1TB out of S3 or EC2 is costs about $90, but is included in a $5 server with Lightsail.

Worth noting: $0.09 per GB for bandwidth overages. So, your $5 server with 1TB out becomes a $95 if you have 2TB out.

Not terribly impressed. It&#x27;s like Digital Ocean and Vultr but with no IPv6 and no direct network interface.<p>What I love about VPSes as opposed to AWS, Azure, or Google is that you get a completely a la carte box with a direct interface right to the Internet and both IPv4 and an IPv6 &#x2F;64. You can instantly provision &quot;servers&quot; that you can do anything you want with -- you can treat them like &quot;pets&quot; to run a personal blog or a legacy app, or you can herd them like &quot;cattle&quot; with your favorite management and provisioning tools. The pricing is great and the infrastructure is mix and match.<p>Many VPS providers (Vultr and I think DO as well) will even let you upload and install an ISO directly onto the KVM instance over the web. That means you can install OpenBSD or even weird OSes. I&#x27;ve heard of people putting wacky stuff like OS&#x2F;2 in the cloud this way. Some even allow nested virtualization.<p>A VPS is ideal for a large number of common work loads, but not all. For things where I want to make extensive use of AWS&#x27;s managed services or where I want to have something more akin to a private data center, EC2 and similar offerings from Microsoft and Google are great. But for those I want the whole enchilada. If I&#x27;m going <i>there</i> I want everything the EC2 management console and API gives me including full-blown VPC, etc.<p>This seems to occupy an uncanny valley. Without IPv6, direct networking, etc. it&#x27;s a crummy VPS, but it&#x27;s not as rich as EC2. The only pluses I see are direct access to AWS services (but if I want that I probably want EC2) and AWS&#x27;s security and uptime &quot;guarantees.&quot;<p>Problem with the latter is that it&#x27;s largely marketing. I&#x27;ve routinely clocked 300-day-plus uptimes on Digital Ocean and I&#x27;ve also had EC2 instances mysterious die or go into a coma. They might have something to say on security, but I&#x27;ve never seen any real <i>proof</i> that AWS security is intrinsically superior to their competition. Neither DO nor Vultr has had a recent major breach AFIAK and they all seem to use the same virtualization tech.

Noob question. How&#x27;s this different from an EC2 instance in a VPC?

Just announced on AWS Reinvent Keynote.<p>It&#x27;s nicely packaged their existing products (EC2, VPC, ...). So you can get Digital Ocean like experience on AWS. You can still tune the underlying services.

It just dumps you into a revamped, less intimidating AWS console so I wouldn&#x27;t be too concerned about this for now.<p>The thing that keeps me away from AWS services is the depth of the service - I need to be an expert in AWS on top of knowing how to configure my servers, which for now is maybe a non starter.<p>It does show you the power of packaging: with a simple domain and thrown together marketing page, you too can target another market segment.

My guess is Amazon wants to rope people into their ecosystem, and they&#x27;ve recognized that many startups have opted for the cheaper VPS providers in their bootstrap days.<p>This is an intriguing move and one that I&#x27;m sure DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr have been fearing may happen.<p>The pricing is on par with these alternatives in the VPS space.

I hate to deviate from the topic, but... is the guy on the front page wearing a red cape?

A quick look at the pricing shows these are plagued by the same problems as DO&#x27;s offerings: only RAM scales linearly with price, while CPU, storage, and data transfer do not.<p>Linode and OVH, while not as prestigious as AWS and DO, offer much more fair pricing when you need more resources.

Keep in mind if you are a current EC2 customer and are excited about a cheaper VPS in your region, the VPSs are only available in Virginia. I was pretty excited about a cheaper VPS I could provision in the Sydney area, but these are restricted to a single datacenter.

It&#x27;s funny to me that Amazon has looped all the way back around to this, while a bunch of smaller providers who&#x27;ve been doing this for over a decade have been trying to catch up with AWS on all the other fronts. But, realistically, for a <i>lot</i> of users, AWS is a stupidly complex beast just to get a website up and running. I&#x27;ve written a bunch of code that interacts with AWS APIs in two languages, and I still require a couple of hours to spin up anything new there.<p>But, as others note, the variable cost factor seems to still be a sticking point. I can setup a Digital Ocean droplet, or Linode, or one of a dozen other low-cost VPS providers, for $5 or $10 a month, and I know it will never cost more than that. Maybe I&#x27;ll bump into memory, disk, or bandwidth limits...but, AWS is a <i>killer</i> if you aren&#x27;t careful. I used to maintain (and pay for, out of pocket) a non-profit&#x27;s website on AWS, and the price ballooned while I wasn&#x27;t paying attention, due to automated backups to S3 and some other stuff, and by the time I noticed was costing me $183&#x2F;month, for a website that could <i>easily</i> run on a cheap VPS. My fault for not paying closer attention, not setting up cost alerts, etc., but I moved the site off of AWS and onto one of my own web servers, where it literally costs me single digit dollars to run (it has many GBs of email but otherwise is a small site with very low traffic).<p>So...unless they&#x27;re giving me some reason to think I won&#x27;t end up with a massive bill one month because of a popular post, or something, I probably still won&#x27;t think &quot;I know, I&#x27;ll use AWS!&quot;, unless it&#x27;s a situation where I need the scaling capabilities of AWS.

When I started out webdev, I was told that I should use AWS. But not having known how private&#x2F;pubkeys work, or how ssh workds, how servers worked, it felt a lot like being thrown in the deep end of the pool.<p>Then I used digitalocean because of the free 1 year server time github gave me and everything was a breeze. They had tutorials for a lot of stuff, like how pubkeys and privatekeys worked, how to use ssh, how a server works, how to use nginx&#x2F;apache, and even node.js stuff. I got up and running quickly even though it was my first time using a VPS. It was super easy, and the best part was with my knowledge gained from DigitalOcean, I was able to start using AWS with relative ease.<p>I think Lightsail is a good competitor to DigitalOcean, good for newbies who can&#x27;t exactly figure out how much their server will use and charge them. But imo, with the same stats and stuff as DigitalOcean as a newbie I&#x27;d stick with DigitalOcean just because of how helpful their tutorials are in general and how helpful their interface is.

I can almost feel the pucker over at DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. It may not be a better product, but that doesn&#x27;t necessarily matter, given the brand power.

I just ran speedtest.net on a $5&#x2F;mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San Francisco (SFO1) datacenter.<p><pre><code> ~ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms Testing download Download: 921.09 Mbit&#x2F;s Testing upload Upload: 705.31 Mbit&#x2F;s </code></pre> Can anybody run speedtest-cli[1] on a 512MB LightSail instance to compare network throughput?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sivel&#x2F;speedtest-cli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sivel&#x2F;speedtest-cli</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;questions&#x2F;does-digital-ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;questions&#x2F;does-digita...</a>

What I was hoping for was a bare-metal (not-run through VMs) container runtime like Joyent Triton[0] but with more pay-for-what-you-use pricing.<p>Unlike VMs, which statically allocate mem whether you use it or not, containers have the chance to grow and reduce mem as workfloads go up and down, which means you could pay for GB&#x2F;h of mem usage on the right-sized # of vCPU base.<p>Not sure if any IaaS&#x2F;PaaS is doing this.<p>Joyent pricing[1] is still for static resource allocation and not cheap compared to these larger players.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyent.com&#x2F;triton" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyent.com&#x2F;triton</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyent.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyent.com&#x2F;pricing</a>

The more you pay the worse performance (per $) you get. Pretty much a &quot;take 2 pay for 3&quot; kind of deal. No matter if it&#x27;s a good price or not I would feel like a schmuck if I went for any other option than the 5$ one.

Just ran a bench on then, and the Disk per is bad.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;xfalcox&#x2F;3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc45f3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;xfalcox&#x2F;3b99beac4935fd154a4cbeb540dc...</a>

Interesting. Pricing is worse than Digital Ocean here. Looks like Linode is still best bang for buck strictly for price to power.<p>Random thoughts from shameless noob:<p>- I like Digital Ocean&#x27;s OS&#x2F;app images for speed &#x2F; smaller projects. Looks like Lightsail offers this with Bitnami. Not sure how complicated that is in their console.<p>- Amazon IAM comes with a bit too much overhead for noobies like myself. Glad this doesn&#x27;t require you to set that up when you just want a quick and dirty VPS.<p>- Bah. Resizing&#x2F;upgrading requires you to do it through API currently. That kind of sucks.<p>- Nice! 30 day free trial.

Lightsail: $5&#x2F;mo 512 MB, 1 core, 20 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $3.2&#x2F;mo 2 GB memory, 2 cores, 50 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.<p>Lightsail 2: $10&#x2F;mo 1 GB memory, 1 core, 30 GB SSD, bandwidth cap -- Scaleway: $10&#x2F;mo 8 GB memory, 6 cores, 200 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.<p>OVH virtual servers have also always been cheaper than Lightsail, and bandwidth is of course unmetered: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ovh.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;vps&#x2F;vps-ssd.xml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ovh.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;vps&#x2F;vps-ssd.xml</a>

The FAQ is extremely unclear, but if I&#x27;m understanding it right, doesn&#x27;t this make transfer out to Internet significantly cheaper if you insist on using AWS? Instead of paying $0.09&#x2F;GB, transfer to Lightsail for $0.02&#x2F;GB then transfer out for $5&#x2F;1000 GB=$0.005&#x2F;GB. You do have to deal with changing IP, but you get a 1.26 order of magnitude decrease in price, and that&#x27;s assuming you don&#x27;t bother actually using the extra compute.

Nice: a much needed simplification of the AWS product surface area. While their plethora of functions and features are tremendously useful for big shops, but are a pretty high bar newer entrants.<p>Now if they could just get to the point where $5 gets you a running Docker container running on the equivalent of the Lightsail VPS (without setting up the backing EC2 infrastructure like ECS), I suspect that&#x27;s closer to the platform that many users really want to have ...

This is going to be a hard blow for DigitalOcean.<p>I don&#x27;t have huge hopes for their business going forward.

This seems like a great option for a utility server for existing AWS customers. With VPC peering you get free and fast transfer between one of these and your existing AWS infrastructure, but in a nice one-price VPS.<p>I also wouldn&#x27;t be too surprised to see some people using these as middle-man boxes to reduce transfer costs associated with EC2 - $5 for 1TB is darned cheap for AWS. Using one of these to back up data from some EC2 hosts would be a win.

Any word on if this includes IPv6 addresses?

I&#x27;m a little confused. How is this different from EC2?

This is very appealing to me just because of the amount of bandwidth that is included. I currently serve 20TB&#x2F;month of static assets for only $160 spread among Softlayer, Digital Ocean and Linode VPSs. If I can host my static assets on the same network as AWS for the same price then that is a huge win, especially since all new Softlayer VPSs only come with a measly amount of bandwidth.

Still isn&#x27;t enough for me to pull my sites off DO. Plus, DO don&#x27;t have a reputation for treating staff like absolute dogshit.

I&#x27;d love to give this a try for my mail server that is currently hosted on Linode. Half the price would be great.<p>Does anyone have experience with how &quot;clean&quot; the AWS IP addresses are? I&#x27;d hate to switch to Lightsail and have to deal with deliverability and spam blacklist issues. I&#x27;ve been fortunate to have had zero issues on Linode.

I have a growing list of cloud &#x2F; vps providers I like to kick the tires on. I&#x27;ll be adding this to the list as well.

Why are people comparing CPU Core and Transfers? Come on, this is HN. What CPU, What Speed? KVM &#x2F; Xen? What SSD? IOPS? etc.<p>It used to be Linode had the better of everything comparing to DO. Faster CPU even if they are same core count. SSD had much faster IOPS. Less oversold therefore bandwidth were good. And there is no point giving you 100TB transfer per month if you are limited to 10Mbps port speed. Linode ran on <i>shared</i> 40Gbps Port and peak bandwidth were great ( for its price ). Then there is the quality of the Network, ping time between different ISP and Exchanges. Linode has consistently been better then DO. And not it offer double the memory.<p>But many are worried about Linode&#x27;s security issues and therefore would not even touch them with a ten foot pole.<p>I have yet to see quality VPS that offer a whole package better then Linode. Vultr, OVH, Online.net and Scaleway included.<p>I am hoping Lightsail bring some competition here.

Hopefully Google Computer Engine will also compete at this price now. Even though it seems to be cheaper than AWS in addition to having a good interface, it&#x27;d be good to get a bunch of cheaper servers to do the small projects and also give it out to developers in situations where static ips are a requirement.

I use AWS for a bunch of things, but the console has always been immensely painful to use, especially to create a no frills simple VPS for a fiver. For that reason alone, I use DigitalOcean and fiddle with AWS authentication if I need to use some of its services there.<p>Lightsail looks excellent since the setup is just a gazillion times more user friendly than the standard EC2. A single page affair, a launch script, authentication, it&#x27;s all there. Once launched, I get all the info and metrics I need.<p>I kinda wish they streamlined their usual console to this level, but this way it&#x27;s fine as well. I don&#x27;t tend to use S3 and EC2 as much as I&#x27;d like given its non-existent UX, but this gives me hope that Amazon is taking user experience seriously.<p>Sure, it may be underpowered compared to DO or Linode, but having all services under one roof is worth it to me. I&#x27;m happy.

Price breakdown LightSail vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net &#x2F; Scaleway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;justjanne&#x2F;205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;justjanne&#x2F;205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...</a>

This puts DigitalOcean in a tough spot. They aren&#x27;t going after the top-tier get your hands dirty customers AWS usually caters to, and they aren&#x27;t going after the no-tech skills audience of godaddy&#x2F;bluehost&#x2F;dreamhost etc. So now it becomes a marketing battle for the middle.

Quick feedback for the AWS team:<p>* First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going.<p>* Instances you start in LightSail don&#x27;t show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there.<p>* Similarly, creating a &quot;static IP address&quot; doesn&#x27;t show up in your elastic IP list. I&#x27;m not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you&#x27;re billing me for is... troublesome.<p>* Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I&#x27;d be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are <i>massive</i>. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)

I am the only one interested in performance? Do these perform like t2 instances (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AWSEC2&#x2F;latest&#x2F;UserGuide&#x2F;t2-instances.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;AWSEC2&#x2F;latest&#x2F;UserGuide&#x2F;t2-instan...</a>) which are burstable and capped? What&#x27;s are the network limits? Are the disks physical or using EBS?<p>I don&#x27;t understand why everybody on this thread is complaining about overages? If you use more than the allocated amount you pay overages, simple idea. Why in the world, would you want your server to just shut down when you reach a limit?

While on this topic, does anyone have any experience with DreamCompute (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dreamhost.com&#x2F;cloud&#x2F;computing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dreamhost.com&#x2F;cloud&#x2F;computing</a>)? I was thinking about trying them out, but could not find any reviews&#x2F;thoughts about them. They seem to offer a lot, for very low prices. Here&#x27;s more -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.dreamhost.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;217744568-What-is-DreamCompute-Predictable-Bill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.dreamhost.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;217744568-What-...</a>

Wow, what perfect timing. I just got approved for AWS Educate and was prepared to do the work to batch auto-provision EC2 instances for my students, but this is much easier to deal with. And at $5 a month for the cheapest machine, it&#x27;s about what I would have paid to set up a t2-nano instance (~$4.70). I didn&#x27;t need anything fancy, just wanted students to have their own machine to deploy public-facing code (e.g. APIs).<p>The in-browser SSH also deals with the problem of students who are on Windows machine. You haven&#x27;t hated PuTTY until you&#x27;ve tried walking a student through it on their Surface Pro.

I just created two 512MB Ubuntu instances and here are my thoughts. (+ indicates positive, - indicates negative, ? question)<p><pre><code> + You can use private networking for cross-instance communication. + You can even communicate with other AWS services by using VPC peering. + Hourly billing. - The firewall rules are not shared. You can&#x27;t create a single rule and attach to multiple instances. ? What are the network throughput caps? Can&#x27;t find it anywhere? ? Are the disk physical or using EBS? ? Can you snapshot a running instance, or does it have to stopped?</code></pre>

Very expensive. The 40$&#x2F;mo plan on Linode, gives and you 4 cores and 8GB ram.

People focusing just on pricing miss the point. The key factor here is that it is easy to get started but if you need to scale you have the full power of AWS offering and ecosystem that cannot be matched by VPS providers

Very smart move from Amazon.<p>The main advantage of Amazon LightSail over DigitalOcean are: built-in firewall (instead of messing with iptables), managed database with AWS RDS, and using S3 with a low latency and no networking cost.

I still don&#x27;t get the VPS craze. For similar prices from OVH, online.net, Hetzner, etc. you&#x27;ve got vastly more powerful physical servers with vastly larger storage... What&#x27;s the point really?

How much of a threat is this to Digital Ocean, Linode, and others?

Hardly a Linode or DO killer yet but could become interesting if&#x2F;when they:<p>1). support more linux distros (hint: Debian)<p>2). let you place instances in other AWS regions<p>3). let you pool bandwidth quotas across instances<p>4). improve the cpu&#x2F;memory competitiveness of their $20+ plans<p>Also, don&#x27;t like the firewall being configured via the dashboard (reminds me of the same crappy approach used by scaleway). Alarming too that their SSH console auto logs you in (even if you started an instance with your own public key rather than Amazon&#x27;s).

tl;dr Only available in us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

I could see the appeal of some of the lower range hardware plans, but especially the higher tiers seem way off in terms of pricing. Can someone clarify why a 2 core&#x2F;8GB machine costs 80$, where other IaaS providers charge far less for such rigs? (DigitalOcean gets you 4 cores for 80$&#x2F;m, TransIP gets you 4 cores, 8GB and 300GB SSD for &lt;55$&#x2F;m...)

Small print: Some types of data transfer in excess of data transfer included in your plan is subject to overage charges.

Given the long term strategy of DigitalOcean and how vastly different it is from what AWS seems to be executing on, I don&#x27;t think this announcement actually changes things for DO that much. There is a mass consolidation about to happen in the IaaS space and it&#x27;s smart for AWS to capture some amount of that.

It seems that you can only create instances in Virginia and you can only choose between Ubuntu 16.04 and Amazon Linux.

This is how aws trying to re:invent ...a lot of stuffs from them this year is trying to crash those smaller saas provider and the open source world like chalice... It seems like they are reinvent the wheel and try hard to grab every single tiny piece of market. I am moving to gcp...at least they handle oos better

With how versatile the AWS ecosystem is and the quality of the Amazon brand this has the potential to absolutely demolish most of the small time VPS providers. Unless you provide a niche such as DDoS protection or PCI&#x2F;HIPAA compliant hosting I do not see how you can compete for legitimate customers.

I meant to say that it was about time someone comes up with something like this, but seems that in the details AWS complexity can still bite you.<p>Is there a service, that you know of, that would simplify AWS so that we can just use it with predictable expenses and ability to grow? Maybe I am asking for too much.

This is exciting. In case any AWS folks are reading this, are there any plans to support Debian 8 as Bare OS?

I don&#x27;t see anything disruptive here. I already have roughly the same cost&#x2F;benefit with Linode.

If you read the fine print, the price and performance isn&#x27;t actually as good as Digital Ocean and a few other similar services, so unless you actually are using AWS services AND need your VM to be in the same VPC or data center as the services, then it doesn&#x27;t make sense.

This is pretty good. I&#x27;m currently paying about $3.50&#x2F;mo for my existing t2.nano-based reserved VPS, and this provides a lot more space and bandwidth for not much more money. If they offered it with a reserved-instance discount, it would be even more compelling.

i&#x27;m still using linode. been using it for 10 years.

Strange, I can&#x27;t seem to find the price of bandwidth when you exceed the included 1 TB.

One day their pricing and performance might actually be competitive. Today is not that day.

This is certainly more in my price range for personal stuff (family sites, etc). Definitely going to take advantage of the free 30 days to kick the tires. Curious to see what sort of server monitoring is included.

I guess this service might prevent people from migrating off Amazon services to DigitalOcean (or other VPS providers), but I don&#x27;t really see a compelling reason to use this service instead of DigitalOcean.

So, it is basically the EC2 &quot;t&quot; family with a simpler (but almost equal) pricing and simpler administration.<p><pre><code> t2.nano = $5 t2.micro = $10 t2.small = $20 t2.medium = $40 t2.large = $80</code></pre>

Digital Ocean still has a better pricing, for example for $20 on Digital Ocean you are getting 2 CPU server vs 1 cpu on amazon. Also $80 Digital Ocean offers 4CPU server while Amazon gives you only 2CPU.

Confirmed that LightSail works with ServerPilot (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverpilot.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverpilot.io&#x2F;</a>).<p>LightSail&#x27;s default firewall opens ports 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP) but has 443 (HTTPS) closed. That seems like a terrible default for making a developer-friendly service. Hopefully they fix that and open 443 by default. Otherwise, a lot of wasted time is going to be spent by developers who have configured SSL on their sites and don&#x27;t know why it isn&#x27;t working.<p>LightSail feels very similar to DreamCompute that DreamHost launched, including the approach of only allowing SSH public key auth without any option of using password auth. So, they&#x27;re intentionally leaving out some users with that approach.

It seems to me the exact same service existed already, by picking a stack on Bitnami&#x27;s website, and single-click-launching it on AWS. The price structure is clearer on Lightsail though.

Why would I use that? With Hosteurope I get 4 vCores, 6 GByte guranteed memory (burst to 12), 200 GByte SSD, traffic flat (but only 100 MBity&#x2F;sec), monthly cacelable for 20 euros.

Having upper ceilings in charging is a big deal for me.<p>For this I prefer <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nearlyfreespeech.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nearlyfreespeech.net&#x2F;</a>

OVH is still cheaper, with half the disk space but 4 time the RAM.

Why are a full half of the front-page stories about Amazon?

Just created a &quot;Magento&quot; instance and attached a static IP. It still unreachable with a browser after a few hours. What did I do wrong?

Am I understanding this correctly?<p>DO and LightSail are close (if not) exactly the same spec wise?<p>All that&#x27;s I&#x27;ve read so far essentially states that.

They advertise a 99.95% EC2 SLA. Does that mean that an instance in a single AZ can go down anytime for any length of time?

This is super awesome... Lesser devops requirement particularly in early stages trying to validate an idea.

No nonsense predictable pricing is what drove me to Rackspace years ago. Good for Amazon figuring this out.

meh the pricing fails in comparison to say linode.com&#x27;s offerings. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linode.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linode.com&#x2F;pricing</a><p>granted with AWS you probably get access to other AWS products so there&#x27;s that...

Sigh. US-only. That kills it for me.

I really like the web based firewall configuration feature. Hope Linode and DO adopte it.

Really wanted to get more information on this, but all of their Docs links currently 404.

What is this service? I can&#x27;t figure out how different it is from Linux on EC2.

I pay ~25$ for 8 gb - 1tb - unlimited bw From online.net.. 80$ is ridiculous

Is there a way to quickly&#x2F;easily migrate EC2 instances to LightSail??

This is extremely, really, amazingly, exciting news! Except for the potential charge gotchas in the FAQ which seems to fly in the face of the banner text on the main page but still...very exciting!

Wow I didn&#x27;t know Amazon bought DigitalOcean ;-)

The performance of DO is far superior compared to Lightsail. Disk speed is a joke, network seems to be limited to 50MB&#x2F;s (which is not that bad) and who knows how much they throttle the CPU.

This site can’t be reached<p>I guess I google virtual private servers

Seems like a play to compete with Digital Ocean.

PSA: The chap in the photo is wearing a cape.

Wow they&#x27;re going after digital ocean

No Windows Server? Surprising.

Digital Ocean is in trouble!

The pricing&#x2F;specs are suspiciously very similar to one of the largest VPS provider.

Time to move from DigitalOcean finally

Fbdnnd

Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB?<p>$5&#x2F;mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 &#x2F; 1024 = $0.0049&#x2F;GB compared to EC2&#x27;s normal $0.09&#x2F;GB -- That&#x27;s a 91-95% discount on egress data!

What a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I&#x27;ve learned new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the &quot;Google is Challenging AWS&quot; thread).<p>I feel as excited as I was for Azure&#x27;s Build 2016. Now I&#x27;m feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I&#x27;d love to see that change, more competition in the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our favour.<p>Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily getting more expensive (for instance I can&#x27;t downsize to a less expensive plan once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100&#x2F;month for something that would work for $5&#x2F;month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee.<p>$5&#x2F;month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move completely off DO. If only AWS had DO&#x27;s community style documentation, I&#x27;d definitely question DO&#x27;s future viability.<p>Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without leaving the IDE, that&#x27;s a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I think an in-browser&#x2F;desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS would be the end game for other cloud providers.

Can I migrate EC2 instances?

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;4iGafDz" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;4iGafDz</a>