Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

| linux | aws | devops |

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.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Pluralistic: Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure (04 May 2026)

Today's links Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Beck, Scientologist; Citizen journalism; Podcast-killing treaty; US x Kiwi copyri...

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow May 4, 2026

1993 communal internet shaped me: https://sive.rs/netizen

1993 communal internet shaped me: https://sive.rs/netizen

via Derek Sivers May 4, 2026

The 1990s called and they want their dialog box back

This is perhaps my favourite feature in Lightroom. You press ⇧T, you draw a few lines, and presto – your photo is now even: This is doubly magical to me. The first part is that this is even possible – that you can straighten the photo in both dimensions af...

via Unsung May 3, 2026

Generated by openring