Ever wish AWS was more like GoDaddy or any other VPS?

I know I have NOT but just in case you did you should check out Amazon Lightsail.

My guess is they were sick of large VPS providers basically wrapping AWS’s services and passing them off as their own.

VPC providers that just slapped some flat monthly fees with enough padding in the margins to cover small spikes in traffic.

Then when they consistently start hitting the upper limits allotted to them the VPS up sells the customer to the next highest flat priced subscription tier keeping their margins intact.

Lightsail might work for the little mom and pop shops just looking to have a website, or even small weekend projects without big traffic spikes but it’s not sustainable for projects looking to be even moderately scalable.

I get what they were going for but the devil is in the details. For example in 9 different places they mention “overage” charges, this means you could end up paying more than the flat fee easily making you subject to the same usage charges that the flat pricing is supposed to be protecting you from.

Now lets say no one comes to your site, or you optimize your code so it can run on less CPUs and transfer less bytes across the internet. Do you get a discount? No! The best you can do is downgrade to a smaller plan.

Honestly at this point in time I am officially NOT recommending using Lightsail, though I would be interested in hearing if any of you have played with it or have a solid use case.

If you are interested in coming up with a solid plan on how to scale your AWS infrastructure up using AI/ML or otherwise you should check out my upcoming workshop on it.