Quick Facts
- WordPress is one of the most popular and most reliable blogging platforms. Blog is a truncation of “weblog”). And on a more technical level, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) written in PHP that uses a MySQL database.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) has over 200 product offerings. Amazon Lightsail offers easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS) instances, containers, storage, databases, and more at a cost-effective monthly price. The cloud is made up of servers in data centers all over the world.
- Amazon Lightsail can be used to launch simple web applications, custom websites, and small business applications. In addition to spinning up test environments (development sandboxes).
Pros:
- Simplified way to getting started in the cloud, that includes a simple user interface
- Inexpensive. Is Free Tier Eligible for 3 months and is then as low as $3.50/month
- Detailed documentation to deploy and secure a WordPress Instance within minutes
- Is very secured, with instance backup and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate included
- IP is static and your instance is standalone, a plus for performance.
- Scalable, only pay for what you use and no long term commitments
Cons:
- Unmanaged VPS where you are responsible for installing, configuring, and upgrading software
- No included customer support without additional cost
- Not as feature rich as a managed WordPress hosting option
- Scaling/migrating an instance size up and down is a manual process
- If additional services are needed such AWS S3 for storage or AWS Cloudfront CDN for performance, will need to look closely at total cost to compare properly to managed hosting options
- A little tech know how is needed to take advantage of the pros
Who is Lightsail for?
- Someone that doesn’t mind being hands on in managing their site that is small scaled
- For WordPress users it can be an inexpensive option for a low traffic blog that is not media heavy
- eCommerce sites can take full advantage of the security features
- Developers needing test environments and to deploy small scale applications
Want the details?
Check out my resources page for documentation on how to set up Amazon Lightsail, a domain register…and see my current WordPress blog I am planning to update.
Kai!! Did you see this!?
Maybe 😁