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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

"It has good reporting and documentation."
"The most valuable feature is scalability, as it is very easy to scale."
"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are ease of use, deployment, and short lead time. If you are using an on-premise solution, you need to wait for the hardware, and nowadays it is very difficult, the lead time becomes very long. We propose to our customers to use Amazon AWS because it is very easy, no need to wait for hardware delivery."
"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the high level of capabilities, cloud-native environment, developer-friendly, intuitive interface, and automation. The solution overall is easy to learn from the resources available."
"The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area."
"I have found the trusted advisor tool works well, we are using it to get some insight into the security status and the processing of the applications."
"It's quite stable and scalable. The price is good as well."
"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."
"The benefit of using Amazon Lightsail over the AWS console management is that it is a small platform that is easy to understand, as it has only the instance, DNS, Route 53, snapshots, backups, and load balancing network."
"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."
"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."
"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."
"In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed."
"The instances optimized for WordPress are very lightweight and straightforward in configuration."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the usability and customer service."
 

Cons

"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."
"I'm not an expert on the product, but if I had to suggest one improvement, I know a feature that would allow a person to backup his on-premise solution to the cloud directly with one click would be useful. This solution should be agnostic because sometimes a product that was backed up with Veeam is highly compatible with Commvault. I think it would be better if these backup features were agnostic. Viewing a build could also be improved. It's not easy to follow up on your consumption and see how much you're paying and how much you will be paying. Viewing the build could be more clear."
"I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately one year."
"The price of the solution is comparatively quite high in comparison with that of Azure."
"Amazon support could be better."
"Recently we had a long conversation about functionality that is missing in Alexa — in Mexico, specifically. Alexa for Business is a service and platform that Americans can use to make a call to an Amazon Echo device or a telephone via the app. But in Mexico, we are not allowed to use that technology. This is a significant disadvantage of AWS for those living in Mexico."
"They should implement the command shell by default. As it is now, to open the console, you have to download the command application."
"Amazon AWS could improve by being more secure and adding more features."
"Currently, there is limited support available while installing or configuring it, and resources are primarily available through community-contributed articles."
"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."
"Backward compatibility and the flexibility to choose software versions while installing would be improvements."
"The solution could be smoother than it is."
"Based on my limited exploration of Amazon Lightsail so far, I would like to see improvements in the console, particularly in user behavior and some cost-related aspects."
"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."
"To improve, I feel the disk management is too basic. I can't easily partition the disk for the operating system. I have to follow the main configuration that is already set up in the template. To partition the disk, I would need to deploy the operating system first and then make changes, but it's not an ideal method. I would recommend improving the disk management."
"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."
"From a cost perspective, Amazon AWS is excellent. You need to pay for a license to use AWS, and the license could be cheaper, but in each of the cases and instances I've used AWS, there has been a good chance to save money."
"AWS is cost-effective because it saves time. Faster deployments and testing make it very valuable."
"In terms of price, there are less expensive options."
"We are currently paying for the solution on an annual basis."
"It's not very pricey, but it could be cheaper."
"We pay for Amazon AWS annually."
"This solution offers good pricing."
"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."
"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."
"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."
"The services that it provides are good for the price."
"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."
"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."
"It's very cheap."
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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.