Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS
Amazon introduced LightSail today in a move that might signal the slow death of “Cloud Hosting Providers” such as Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Linode.
Blast off with Lightsail; Everything you need to jump start your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price.Source: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS
Users of these services have historically been frustrated by AWS’s unpredictable pay as you go pricing that can at times reach astronomical rates. A good example is network transfer; the other day we moved a 120GB image from one server to another data center and it cost upwards of $17 for the transfer itself. This would have been free on the lowest plan of any other smaller cloud hosting provider.
You can check out an excellent run down of LightSail on the Linux Academy Blog.
LightSail is somewhat competitively priced, but Linode and Vultr are both still better deals for now. I think this is great from a competitive perspective. Smaller companies will need to up their game in order to compete with Amazons mind and market share. I am looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
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