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Amazon AWS vs Amazon Lightsail comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
259
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Amazon Lightsail
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
6th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.2%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.6%
Amazon Lightsail2.2%
Other84.2%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
VictorAugusto De Souza E Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at Leek Solucoes
Has simplified website migration and reduced hosting costs significantly
Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk. It would be beneficial to have a welcome instance where we can just set the instance, go there to edit and select a greater instance from large to x-large or 2x-large. I do not see the need to scale down, but it would be good too. When we are on an x-large for testing purposes and need to do a rollback to a large one, we need to scale down. We do not have this capability on Amazon Lightsail.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We like the that, within the public subnet of this solution, a new instance of the tool is launched when it detects an issue, in order to prevent interruptions in performance."
"It allows us to cheaply experiment with lots of different setups, evaluate prices and business ROI, and rollout solutions effectively."
"Support is really good."
"They provide cutting-edge features compared to other cloud vendors."
"Amazon AWS has good performance and easy management."
"The whole solution is well designed and AWS has decent documentation, which is not to be taken for granted. I've also found that AWS is easy to use."
"Macie is great. It is a service that makes recommendations on a data layer for cybersecurity. It is a great service."
"The main reason why we use EC2 is because we are not dependent on maintaining the hardware inside our premises. Also, we have full control over the infrastructure, and we can modify it as per our own requirements."
"EC2 instances are pre-configured and upgraded, so you can simply select and instantly pay for an EC2 instance to set up WordPress, Node.js, or a server container using Docker."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"I find Lightsail particularly valuable for hosting WordPress as it is easier to set up than a bare metal server, which requires extensive configuration and package installations."
"Implementations are completed with a few clicks, allowing efficient transitions to other development stages, and setup is easy whether for online support or basic business requirements."
"One of the product's most valuable features is its fixed pricing, which makes it ideal for small projects and websites that do not require scaling."
"In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed."
"The most valuable features are the usability and customer service."
"The instances optimized for WordPress are very lightweight and straightforward in configuration."
 

Cons

"Amazon AWS could improve its user interface to make it more user-friendly, especially for people who are not highly technical."
"In some scenarios, Azure will support hybrid cloud better while AWS offers direct connection."
"The dashboard and interface need improvement."
"IAM must be made simple and straightforward."
"The price needs improvement."
"Some services that are not used often have poor quality and need to be improved."
"We have had some difficulty figuring out how to monitor how many EC2 instances have been networked into our entire enterprise. We usually try to create a diagram outside of AWS. The types of information we are trying to determine are, for example, what hardware devices are interconnected, and when was the interconnection made."
"There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."
"Currently, there is limited support available while installing or configuring it, and resources are primarily available through community-contributed articles."
"Backward compatibility and the flexibility to choose software versions while installing would be improvements."
"The product's network features need enhancement."
"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."
"The disadvantage I see is data storage; if any data crash occurs in the cloud server, that will lead to significant losses for the customer."
"When you need to add some custom rules to Amazon Lightsail, the auto scaling feature is a bit difficult."
"Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk."
"I don't see this solution as enterprise-ready, for bigger companies like banks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing can be purchased on a yearly basis, which is an auto-renewal. We also have an on-demand on-pay purchase."
"Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times."
"A few of our customers pay for it yearly and monthly. Sometimes, when it's related to the data, the pricing seems to be high. It could be cheaper on a transactional basis."
"It is comparable if you add in the price structure to an on-prem solution."
"You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption."
"Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available."
"The licensing cost varies with the project involved."
"The pricing is reasonable. It's not expensive, nor will it be cheap, but the free credits initially given provide leverage for new companies to start their businesses."
"It's very cheap."
"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."
"The services that it provides are good for the price."
"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."
"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."
"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."
"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
University
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?
Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.
What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?
Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with mo...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Lightsail?
We have a blog that was hosted on Pagely, and we needed to migrate to AWS because of Pagely's pricing. We are using the VPS instance, specifically the WordPress VPS instance. We are also using the ...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.