Amazon Lightsail Pricing: 2026 Guide to True Total Cost

The $5/month Lightsail plan looks straightforward until you add the managed database, CDN distribution, and daily snapshots you actually need for a production site. Suddenly that $5 instance is a $35-48/month bill - and that's before anyone tells you that stopping an instance doesn't pause the charges.

Amazon Lightsail pricing starts at $3.50/month for an IPv6-only Linux instance and scales up to $2,344/month for the newest 512 GB memory-optimized bundle. But the plan price is only part of the story. The true monthly cost for a realistic deployment includes the database, CDN, block storage, snapshots, and data transfer overage - each billed separately.

By the end of this guide, you'll know exact pricing for every Lightsail resource type, the five billing behaviors that generate surprise charges, and what a realistic monthly bill looks like for three common project types. Use the Lightsail pricing calculator alongside this guide to model your specific configuration.

I built the Lightsail pricing calculator to answer exactly this question, and the most common thing people discover while using it is that the instance plan is the smallest line on the bill. Pricing reflects the Amazon Lightsail pricing page as of March 2026, including the memory-optimized instances launched February 2026 and expanded database bundles from January 2026.

How Lightsail Billing Works

Before diving into plan prices, the billing model needs a bit of explanation - because there are two behaviors here that differ from most VPS providers and EC2, and both affect how you budget.

Lightsail uses a flat-rate bundle model: every plan includes compute (vCPUs), memory, SSD storage, and a data transfer allowance in one monthly price. There are no separate compute, storage, or networking line items on the instance itself. Data transfer overage is the only variable element in an otherwise predictable bill.

Hourly Billing with a Monthly Cap

Lightsail bills on an hourly rate but caps the total at the monthly plan price. You pay only for the hours you use, never more than the monthly maximum. If you launch a $12/month instance on the 20th of the month, you pay roughly $4 for that partial month.

Hourly rates work out to:

• $5/month Linux plan: ~$0.0067/hour
• $9.50/month Windows plan: ~$0.0127/hour

Prorated billing applies when resources are deleted mid-month.

Stopped Instances Still Accrue Charges

This is the one that generates the most billing surprises for users coming from DigitalOcean or Vultr. Stopping a Lightsail instance does not pause billing. Both running and stopped instances accrue charges at the full plan rate. The same applies to managed databases.

Deletion is the only way to stop charges. If you want to "pause" an instance to save money, the correct workflow is: take a snapshot, then delete the instance. When you need it again, create a new instance from the snapshot. Snapshot storage at $0.05/GB-month costs a fraction of keeping the instance running.

This is documented in the Lightsail billing FAQ but not prominently surfaced in the console.

Free Tier and Trial Details

New customers get 750 hours/month free on the $5/month Linux plan for the first calendar month of Lightsail signup. That 750 hours can be spread across multiple instances - 10 instances running for 75 hours each still qualifies.

The extended free trial applies to accounts that started Lightsail usage on or after July 8, 2021:

• 3 months free (up to 750 hours/month each): $5, $7, and $12/month Linux bundles; $9.50, $14, and $22/month Windows bundles; the $15/month database bundle; and the Micro container service
• 12 months free: CDN distributions (50 GB/month; $2.50/month after)
• 1 year free: The 5 GB object storage bundle ($1/month after)

One restriction worth knowing: if your AWS account is linked to an AWS Organization, only one account within the organization can use the free tier offers. If you're deploying Lightsail inside a managed organization, check whether another account has already claimed it.

Lightsail Instance Pricing (Virtual Servers)

Lightsail offers two instance bundle families: General Purpose (balanced compute and memory) and Memory Optimized (higher memory-to-vCPU ratio for caching and analytics workloads). Each family comes in two networking variants - with a public IPv4 address or IPv6-only - at different price points.

The full range runs from $3.50/month for the entry-level IPv6-only nano instance up to $2,344/month for the 512 GB memory-optimized configuration.

Linux/Unix General Purpose Plans (IPv4)

These are the plans most people start with. Every plan bundles 2-64 vCPUs, 512 MB to 256 GB of RAM, 20 GB to 1,280 GB SSD, and a data transfer allowance. Instances created after June 29, 2023 include 2 vCPUs on the nano/micro/small tiers (older instances have 1 vCPU).

The 4Xlarge through 16Xlarge tiers were added in October 2025, significantly expanding Lightsail's capacity ceiling for larger workloads.

Note that Asia Pacific regions (Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta) include half the listed data transfer allowance for every plan. The $12/month Small plan that includes 3 TB in US-East only includes 1.5 TB in Mumbai. More on that in the data transfer section.

IPv6-Only Plans: Save Up to 30%

IPv6-only instances are identical in compute, memory, SSD, and data transfer specs to their IPv4 counterparts. The only difference is they don't get a public IPv4 address - and that saves you 20-30% on the plan price.

The $5/month nano becomes $3.50/month as IPv6-only. The $84/month Xlarge becomes $80/month. At the higher tiers the absolute savings are larger even if the percentage is similar.

This pricing tier is absent from every competing blog post I've seen. It's documented only on the AWS pricing page, but the savings are real and meaningful for anyone running multiple instances.

When IPv6-only works: any workload accessed through a load balancer or CDN (which provides IPv4 termination), internal microservices, APIs behind a reverse proxy, and any IPv6-capable application stack. When it doesn't: direct public access from IPv4-only clients, legacy integrations that don't support IPv6, anything that needs to be reached from the public internet without a load balancer in front.

Memory Optimized Instances (New in February 2026)

Amazon launched memory-optimized Lightsail bundles on February 2, 2026. These have a higher memory-to-vCPU ratio than the general purpose plans and are aimed at workloads that need a lot of RAM relative to compute: in-memory caching, real-time analytics, large in-memory databases, and enterprise applications with high memory pressure.

Compare the $74/month Memory Optimized Large (2 vCPU, 16 GB) against the $84/month General Purpose Xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GB). If you need 16 GB but don't need the 4th vCPU, the memory-optimized plan costs $10 less per month with the same RAM. Both IPv4 and IPv6-only variants are available.

Windows Instances

Windows instances carry a premium for the Windows Server license. The entry-level nano plan starts at $9.50/month compared to $5/month for Linux - nearly double. The same compute and storage specs, just with the OS license cost baked in.

Windows Memory Optimized instances are also available, starting at $4,204/month for the 512 GB tier. Windows instances also have IPv6-only variants at lower price points, with the same $3.50-8/month savings depending on tier.

Once you've sized your instance, the next decision is whether you need a managed database.

Lightsail Managed Database Pricing

Lightsail managed databases support MySQL and PostgreSQL. Pricing is straightforward: pick a bundle size, choose Standard or High Availability. The database has its own data transfer allowance separate from your instance's allowance.

Six bundle sizes are available after the expansion in January 2026, ranging from 1 GB RAM / 40 GB SSD up to 32 GB RAM / 960 GB SSD.

Standard vs High Availability: Is the 2x Price Worth It?

High Availability costs exactly double the Standard plan price. What you get for that premium: a standby database instance in a second Availability Zone with automatic failover (typically 60-120 seconds). If the primary AZ goes down or the primary database instance fails, Lightsail automatically promotes the standby.

The honest answer about whether HA is worth it: it depends on your downtime tolerance and what an hour of database unavailability costs you.

For a production application where users can't complete transactions during an outage, the $15/month premium to go from $15 Standard to $30 HA is almost certainly worth it. An hour of downtime on most commercial applications costs more than that in lost revenue or customer support time alone.

For development databases, staging environments, personal projects, or any workload with a backup strategy that can tolerate a 30-60 minute manual restore from snapshot, stay on Standard.

One more consideration: the $15/month Standard plan does not include data encryption at rest. If your compliance requirements mandate encryption - PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR with sensitive data - the $30/month plan is required regardless of the HA decision, because encryption only starts at the 2 GB tier.

Database Bundle Comparison Table

The database data transfer allowance is separate from your instance allowance - traffic between a Lightsail instance and a Lightsail database over private IPs is free and doesn't count against either allowance.

If you're deploying containers instead of a traditional server, the pricing model works a bit differently.

Container Service Pricing

Lightsail container services run Linux-based Docker containers. You pay per node per month, and you scale horizontally by specifying how many nodes you want. A Micro service with 3 nodes costs $30/month. Each container service includes a 500 GB/month data transfer quota (both inbound and outbound).

There's an architecture limitation worth knowing before you commit to Lightsail containers: container services cannot be used as origins for Lightsail CDN distributions or as targets for Lightsail load balancers. If you want a CDN in front of your containers, or if you want Lightsail's built-in load balancer distributing traffic to containers, that's not supported. Containers need their own access pattern - direct DNS or a third-party load balancer.

Also, like instances and databases: a container service in a disabled state still incurs charges. Deletion is required to stop billing.

For users with containerized workloads comparing Lightsail containers to managed container services, it's worth looking at ECS on Fargate as an alternative that supports auto-scaling and integrates with the full suite of AWS networking services.

Beyond instances and databases, the supporting services each add to your total bill.

CDN, Object Storage, and Other Resource Pricing

The supporting services are where a $5/month Lightsail setup can become a $15-20/month setup - but they also represent real value and the first-year free tiers are among the most generous in the industry.

CDN Distribution Pricing

Lightsail CDN distributions cache and deliver your content globally. Three plan tiers:

Data transfer overage above the plan's included transfer starts at $0.09/GB (US regions) up to $0.132/GB (Asia Pacific Jakarta). Note that CDN distribution overage charges apply to all data transfer out, not just internet egress.

Lightsail's CDN is built on Amazon CloudFront with simplified pricing. If you need CloudFront's full feature set (custom behaviors, Lambda@Edge, advanced caching controls), you'd move to CloudFront directly.

One useful feature: the CDN distribution plan can be changed once per billing cycle. If you're approaching the Starter plan's 50 GB limit mid-month, upgrade to Standard proactively to avoid $0.09/GB overage charges on the excess.

Object Storage Pricing

Lightsail object storage bundles include storage and transfer in one monthly price:

The real value of object storage isn't just its low cost - it's that transfer from object storage counts against the object storage plan's allowance, not your instance's data transfer allowance. Serving static assets (images, videos, JS bundles) from object storage keeps your instance's transfer budget free for dynamic requests.

Overage rates on object storage vary by region. US regions: $0.023/GB storage, $0.09/GB transfer. Asia Pacific regions: $0.023-0.025/GB storage, $0.11-0.132/GB transfer.

Load Balancer Pricing

The Lightsail load balancer costs $18/month flat. No per-connection fees, no bandwidth monitoring charges. SSL/TLS certificate management is included at no additional cost - the load balancer handles certificate provisioning and renewal automatically.

One hard limitation: Lightsail load balancers support up to 5 GB of traffic per hour. This is a capacity ceiling, not a pricing tier. If your workload needs to handle more than 5 GB/hour, you need to move to an EC2-based Application Load Balancer or Network Load Balancer, which involves stepping out of the Lightsail ecosystem.

Block Storage and Snapshots

Block storage pricing is $0.10 per allocated GB per month, starting at an 8 GB minimum. A 128 GB block storage volume costs $12.80/month. You can attach additional block storage up to 16 TB total per instance.

Snapshots cost $0.05 per GB-month and work incrementally. The first snapshot of a 28 GB instance costs $1.40/month. If you take a second snapshot a week later and only 2 GB of data changed, that second snapshot costs $0.10/month - you're only charged for the delta.

This incremental pricing makes snapshots economical for backup purposes, but there's a catch: snapshots accumulate. If you enable automatic daily snapshots with 7-day retention and never audit your snapshot library, you'll end up paying for many more snapshots than you realize. We'll quantify this in the next section.

Data transfer is the one part of Lightsail pricing that isn't completely flat-rate, and the rules are more nuanced than the plan pages suggest.

Data Transfer: The One Variable Cost

Every Lightsail plan includes a generous data transfer allowance - 1 TB to 10 TB per month depending on plan size. But how that allowance is counted, what triggers overage charges, and how the rules change in Asia Pacific regions all have real billing implications.

What Counts Toward Your Allowance

Both inbound (data transfer IN) and outbound (data transfer OUT) count toward the plan's included allowance. This surprises many users who assume only outbound traffic matters.

Here's where the distinction gets important: inbound overage is free. If you exceed your allowance entirely through inbound traffic (a large data import, for example), you won't pay overage charges. But that inbound traffic has already consumed the allowance that would otherwise cover your outbound traffic. Once the allowance is depleted, only outbound charges apply.

Transfers that are always free, even when over the allowance:

• Data transfer IN to any Lightsail instance
• Data transfer between Lightsail instances using private IP addresses
• Data transfer between Lightsail instances and Lightsail managed databases over private IPs
• Data transfer between Lightsail and other AWS resources in the same Region via private IPs
• Data transfer between Availability Zones using private addresses

The aggregation rule is also useful for planning: data transfer allowances pool across instances of the same bundle type in a Region. Two $5/month nano instances in us-east-1 share a combined 2 TB allowance, not 1 TB each. If one instance is high-transfer and the other is idle, the idle instance's unused allowance offsets the active one's usage.

Overage Charges by Region

When outbound transfers exceed your allowance, overage charges apply only to the excess outbound traffic to the internet (or to AWS resources via public IP):

US and EU regions have the same overage rate. Asia Pacific regions have meaningfully higher rates, which compounds the next problem.

Asia Pacific Regions: Half the Standard Allowance

Plans deployed in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) include half the listed data transfer allowance for the same price as the standard listing.

A $12/month Small instance advertises 3 TB of data transfer. In US-East, you get 3 TB. In Mumbai or Sydney, you get 1.5 TB. Same plan price, half the allowance.

This doubles the effective per-GB rate for high-transfer workloads in those regions, on top of the already-higher overage rates. A workload that fits comfortably within its allowance in Virginia might consistently exceed it in Tokyo.

The mitigation: put a CDN distribution in front of your instance. CDN distributions have their own separate data transfer quota that doesn't count against the instance allowance, and they're effective at caching static content that would otherwise consume your instance's transfer budget.

5 Lightsail Costs That Surprise New Users

These are the five charges that show up on bills without warning. None of them are hidden in the fine print - they're documented in AWS's pricing page and billing FAQ. But they're absent from competing guides, and they're the most common sources of "why is my bill twice what I expected?" questions.

1. Stopped Instances Keep Billing

This one causes the most confusion for users migrating from other VPS providers where stopping an instance pauses the compute charge. In Lightsail, stopping has no billing effect whatsoever.

A $5/month instance running 730 hours costs $5. The same instance stopped for 730 hours costs $5. There is no distinction.

If you want to save money on an instance you're not actively using, the correct workflow is: take a snapshot ($0.05/GB-month), delete the instance (billing stops), and restore from snapshot when you need it again. A 28 GB snapshot costs $1.40/month - compared to $5/month for a running nano instance, that's a 72% reduction.

2. Snapshot Storage Accumulates Month After Month

Automatic daily snapshots are one of Lightsail's most useful features. They're also a silent cost that compounds if you don't manage retention.

With a 7-day retention policy on a Large-8GB instance (160 GB SSD), you're holding roughly 7 full snapshots. Even with incremental pricing, you might accumulate 200+ GB of snapshot data over time. At $0.05/GB-month, that's $10/month in snapshot costs sitting on top of your $44/month instance plan.

For production environments, this is usually worth it. For staging environments or personal projects, weekly snapshots instead of daily ones cut that cost by 85% with minimal practical impact on your recovery point objective.

3. Idle Static IPs Cost $0.005/Hour

Static IPv4 addresses are free when attached to a running instance. Leave one unattached for more than an hour and you start paying $0.005/hour - $3.60/month if it sits idle for a full month.

The common scenario: you delete an instance but forget to release the static IP. The instance is gone, the billing is supposed to be over, but the orphaned IP keeps generating charges. Check the Networking section of the Lightsail console periodically for unattached static IPs.

4. Asia Pacific Regions: Half the Transfer for the Same Price

Covered in the data transfer section, but worth framing as a billing surprise for users who deployed in Mumbai or Sydney without knowing this rule exists.

If you chose the $12/month Small plan expecting 3 TB of transfer, and you're in the AP (Mumbai) region, you're actually working with 1.5 TB. That's the standard allowance for the next tier down, at the same price. Add the higher overage rate ($0.13/GB vs $0.09/GB), and a transfer-heavy workload in Mumbai can cost meaningfully more than the same workload in Virginia.

CDN distributions and object storage are the primary mitigations - both have their own transfer quotas and can offload a significant portion of your instance's bandwidth requirements.

5. High Availability Database Doubles Your Monthly Cost

HA pricing is clearly documented: it costs exactly 2x the Standard plan. But users often enable HA when setting up a production database without fully absorbing what that means for a budget that was planned around Standard pricing.

If you budgeted $15/month for a managed database and enabled HA by default, you're paying $30/month. On a $12/month instance with a $30/month HA database, the database is 2.5x the cost of the server it's serving.

For development databases, staging environments, and personal projects, Standard is almost always the right choice. The question to ask before enabling HA: does an hour of database downtime cost more than the monthly price difference? If yes, enable it. If no, stay on Standard and rely on snapshots for disaster recovery.

Now let's look at what a real Lightsail deployment actually costs when you put all these pieces together.

Real-World Lightsail Cost Scenarios

The best way to see what you'll actually pay is to build out realistic line-item scenarios. These four scenarios cover the most common project types and show where the costs actually land.

Scenario 1: Personal WordPress Blog ($5-9/month)

This is the scenario AWS highlights prominently, and the numbers are accurate:

Choosing the IPv6-only nano at $3.50/month instead saves another $18/year. A low-traffic personal blog that can use a load balancer or CDN for IPv4 termination is a good candidate for IPv6-only.

If you're running WordPress on Lightsail, the next thing to address after cost planning is WordPress security hardening on Lightsail - easy to overlook but important before traffic picks up.

You can estimate your specific configuration with the Lightsail pricing calculator.

Scenario 2: Small Business WordPress with Database ($28-48/month)

A real business site needs more RAM for WordPress plugins and caching, plus a managed database instead of a local MySQL instance:

The snapshot line is important here. Daily 7-day-retention snapshots on a Small instance accumulate. That $5/month estimate assumes the total snapshot footprint stabilizes around 100 GB, which is realistic for a site where most days see fewer than 5 GB of changed data.

Scenario 3: SaaS MVP with Instance, Database, and Load Balancer ($45-63/month)

A web application with a load-balanced instance, managed database, and static assets served through CDN:

One important architectural limitation: the Lightsail load balancer and CDN distributions cannot be used directly with container services. This scenario uses an instance as the load balancer target. For a container-only architecture, evaluate whether Lightsail containers with direct DNS access fits your model, or whether ECS Fargate with an Application Load Balancer is more appropriate.

Scenario 4: Staging Environment (Cost-Optimized)

Staging environments are perfect candidates for Lightsail's cost-saving options because they don't need high availability and can tolerate some inconvenience:

For staging environments that aren't needed 24/7, the snapshot-and-delete workflow reduces this further. Delete the instance between major test cycles, restore from snapshot when needed. The database is the only persistent cost.

If you're deciding between Lightsail and EC2, the pricing comparison is less obvious than it looks.

Amazon Lightsail vs EC2: When Each Makes Sense

The instinct to compare Lightsail and EC2 on instance price alone misses the real cost driver: data transfer. Once you include the full picture - EBS, Elastic IP, and outbound data transfer - the comparison changes significantly for certain workload types.

For context on EC2's full pricing structure, the Amazon EC2 pricing guide covers instance types, Savings Plans, and Spot pricing in detail.

Side-by-Side Cost Comparison

Take the $5 Lightsail nano (2 vCPU, 512 MB, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB transfer) and compare it to an equivalent EC2 setup:

The data transfer line is the story. For low-traffic workloads with under 50 GB of monthly outbound transfer, EC2 is cost-competitive or cheaper. For any workload that regularly transfers several hundred GB or more, Lightsail's bundled transfer makes it substantially cheaper than EC2 on-demand.

EC2 wins in three scenarios:

1. Intermittent workloads: EC2 Spot Instances can be 90% cheaper than Lightsail for non-time-sensitive batch processing or development workloads
2. Long-term commitments: EC2 Reserved Instances offer up to 72% discount over 1-3 years; Lightsail has no reserved pricing option
3. Complex architectures: Lightsail doesn't support auto-scaling, full VPC integration, or advanced AWS service integrations; EC2 does. The VPC networking costs that come with EC2 add overhead, but they also unlock capabilities Lightsail can't match

AWS's own decision guidance is available in their decision guide for Lightsail vs EC2. The short version: Lightsail for predictable small-to-medium workloads with significant data transfer; EC2 for everything that needs flexibility, scale, or cost optimization through commitment.

Use the EC2 pricing calculator to run your specific EC2 configuration numbers against Lightsail for an accurate comparison.

Which Lightsail Plan Should You Choose?

One important constraint upfront: you cannot directly downsize a Lightsail instance. To move to a smaller bundle, you take a snapshot of the current instance and create a new one from that snapshot on the target bundle. This means starting conservatively is better than over-provisioning, because the path back down requires a migration step.

Here's how I think about plan selection by use case:

The memory-optimized plans make sense when you have a workload with a high memory-to-compute ratio: Redis-compatible caching, large in-memory analytics datasets, or a database you're running directly on the instance rather than as a managed service.

For new deployments, I'd suggest sizing conservatively and monitoring CPU and memory utilization for the first two weeks. Lightsail's built-in metrics console shows both, and upgrading via snapshot takes under 30 minutes.

Lightsail Cost Optimization: 5 Ways to Lower Your Bill

Each of the five billing surprises from earlier has a corresponding mitigation. Here's how to address each one proactively.

Lightsail cost optimization is a specific application of broader AWS cost optimization principles - the same shift-left mindset applies, just with a simpler toolset given Lightsail's managed nature.

1. Use IPv6-Only Bundles

If your architecture can work without a direct public IPv4 address, IPv6-only instances save 20-30% over equivalent IPv4 plans. At the nano tier, that's $1.50/month saved. Running 5 nano instances? That's $9/month or $108/year from a simple configuration choice.

Use a Lightsail load balancer ($18/month) in front of IPv6-only instances to handle IPv4 termination for public-facing workloads. The load balancer cost pays for itself at two or more instances where it replaces two $1.50-2/month IPv4 premiums plus adds HTTPS offload and health checking.

2. Delete, Don't Stop

The math is straightforward: a 28 GB Lightsail nano snapshot costs $1.40/month at $0.05/GB. The running nano costs $5/month. Taking a snapshot and deleting the instance saves 72% per month for resources you're not actively using.

Establish a habit of checking for stopped instances in the Lightsail console. If an instance has been stopped for more than a few days and you're not about to start it again, snapshot and delete it.

3. Manage Snapshot Retention

Set a retention policy and stick to it. Automatic daily snapshots are useful, but 30+ days of accumulated snapshots for a production instance can add up to $15-20/month in snapshot storage.

For staging environments: weekly manual snapshots are usually sufficient. For production: 7-day automatic retention captures a reasonable recovery window without accumulating unbounded storage. Review your snapshot library quarterly and delete snapshots you no longer need.

4. Serve Static Assets from Object Storage and CDN

Combining the $1/month object storage bundle with the free-first-year CDN distribution offloads static content from your instance's data transfer allowance. Images, videos, JavaScript, CSS - all of it served from CDN without touching your instance's 1-3 TB monthly budget.

For a WordPress site on the $5/month nano plan, keeping your media library in object storage and serving it through CDN means your 1 TB instance allowance is almost entirely available for WordPress page requests. This setup costs $6/month (instance + object storage, CDN free year 1) per the official AWS pricing example.

5. Right-Size by Upgrading via Snapshot

Because you can't downsize directly, getting the initial size right matters more than it does on EC2. Start at what you think you need, not one tier up "just in case."

If you find you've over-provisioned after a few weeks of actual load data, the upgrade-via-snapshot process also works for downgrades: take a snapshot, create a new instance from the snapshot using the smaller bundle, point your DNS at the new instance, delete the old one. It's a migration, not an in-place change, but it's manageable for most workloads with a short maintenance window.

Key Takeaways

Amazon Lightsail pricing is genuinely simple compared to EC2 - one monthly price covers compute, storage, and a large data transfer allowance. But "simple" doesn't mean "no surprises" if you don't understand the mechanics.

Five things to remember:

1. Stopping doesn't pause billing. Only deletion stops charges. Snapshot and delete resources you're not using.

2. IPv6-only saves 20-30%. If your workload doesn't need a direct public IPv4 address, there's a cheaper tier that no competing guide covers.

3. Budget for the full stack. For most real projects, your actual monthly cost is instance + database + CDN + snapshots. That's typically 3-6x the instance plan price.

4. Asia Pacific regions get half the standard data transfer allowance. If you're deploying in Mumbai, Sydney, or Jakarta, plan your CDN and object storage strategy before you need it.

5. For small, steady-state web workloads with significant data transfer, Lightsail is substantially cheaper than EC2. The EC2 comparison only looks close if you ignore the data transfer line.

If you're setting up Lightsail as your first AWS service, review AWS account best practices before you deploy. Then use the Lightsail pricing calculator to model your specific configuration before committing to a plan.

Frequently Asked Questions