Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
Many of you may have heard about Amazon’s latest product named Lightsail. This service is designed to competed with shared hosting providers. A few years back I moved my websites from shared hosting, to self hosing, and ultimately to a dedicated server with 1&1 hostsing. For $85 a month it wasn’t a bad deal. Although the server seemed very sluggish at times and the network wasn’t very fast it was still better than shared hosting.
Over the course of the last two weeks I moved all my web assets to Amazon Lightsail and I couldn’t be happier. The Amazon network is lightening fast and the $5 per month instance is out performing the dedicated server I had from 1&1 hosting. Lightsail offers many plans starting at $5 a month all the way to $80 a month.
With Lightsail you can deploy an application specific instance or a vanilla OS to use as you see fit. The idea is to make AWS easy for the novice who was too confused by AWS services to gain more of the shared hosting market. However I have looked at AWS in the past and using straight up AWS my fee’s would have been much more than the prices being offered through Lightsail. You also have the option of using Linux and Windows instances.
The instances deployed as part of Amazon Lightsail are Bitnami instances. If you are not familiar there is a slight leaning curve to become familiar, however they have great documentation to get you going. If you are using a standard shared hosting platform I recommend checking out Lightsail. You will be impressed by the performance gains you will see for a bit of work. I moved both WordPress sites and well as a Joomla. Both were very easy to migrate.
The are a few areas where you will have to do a little extra work, but nothing unachievable if you can follow step by step instructions. I use the freely available Let’s Encrypt service for SSL certificates for all my sites. After following a simple step by step tutorial I was easily able to get up and running on my Lightsail instances. A few other plugins will need a little added configuration. Plugins like WP Super Cache. However as I stated earlier the documentation does a great job and guiding you through the setup.
After moving my instances over I decided to go after some extra performance gains and setup my sites to use Amazon S3 storage along with CloudFront to speed up my images for those looking at any of my step by step articles. My new monthly cost for this solution is now $6.48 a month as opposed to the over $85 per month I was paying with my dedicated server. Those of you who have visited my site in the past are certain to notice the speed improvements I have gained from this move.
1&1 Hosting
If you are using 1&1 hosting regardless if you are planning on staying or moving there is a simple thing you can do to save 25%. While I was cancelling my 1&1 contract they tried to persuade me to stay by offering to lower my monthly cost by 25%. So if you are a customer and are looking to lower your bill, just go through the cancellation steps and when the make the offer score a 25% discount on your monthly bill.
Hopefully either through switching to Lightsail, or lowering your 1&1 bill this helps some of you save some $$$ each month. More importantly I hope you like the new faster experience of Dailyhypervisor.