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What is Amazon Lightsail?

Last updated: April 1, 2021

Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to get started with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for developers who need to build websites or web applications. It includes everything you need to launch your project quickly - instances (virtual private servers), container services, managed databases, content delivery network (CDN) distributions, load balancers, SSD-based block storage, static IP addresses, DNS management of registered domains, and resource snapshots (backups) - for a low, predictable monthly price.

Who is Lightsail for?

Lightsail is for developers. You can choose an image for your Lightsail instance that jumpstarts your dev project so you don't have to spend as much time installing software or frameworks.

If you're an individual developer or hobbyist working on a personal project, Lightsail can help you deploy and manage basic cloud resources. You might also be interested in learning or experimenting with cloud services, such as virtual machines or networking. Lightsail provides a quick way to get started.

Lightsail has images with base operating systems, development stacks like LAMP, LEMP (Nginx), and SQL Server Express, and applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento. For more detailed information about the software installed on each image, see Choose a Lightsail instance image.

As your project grows, you can add block storage disks and attach them to your Lightsail instance. You can take snapshots of these instances and disks and easily create new instances from those snapshots. You can also peer your VPC so that your Lightsail instances can use other AWS resources outside of Lightsail.

You can also create a Lightsail load balancer and attach target instances to create a highly available application. You can also configure your load balancer to handle encrypted (HTTPS) traffic, session persistence, health checking, and more.

Operating systems in Lightsail

    Linux

  • Amazon Linux (2018)

  • Amazon Linux 2

  • CentOS 7 and 8

  • Ubuntu 16, 18, and 20

  • Free BSD 10

  • Debian 8, 9, and 10

  • openSUSE Leap

    Windows

  • Windows Server 2019

  • Windows Server 2016

  • Windows Server 2012 R2

CMS applications in Lightsail

    Linux

  • WordPress certified by Bitnami

  • WordPress Multisite certified by Bitnami

  • cPanel & WHM

  • PrestaShop

  • Drupal packaged by Bitnami

  • Ghost packaged by Bitnami

  • Joomla packaged by Bitnami

  • Plesk Hosting Stack on Ubuntu

E-commerce and project management applications in Lightsail

    Linux

  • Magento packaged by Bitnami (eCommerce)

  • Redmine packaged by Bitnami (Project Management)

Development stacks in Lightsail

    Linux

  • LAMP stack (PHP 7) packaged by Bitnami

  • Node.js packaged by Bitnami

  • MEAN Stack packaged by Bitnami (HVM)

  • Nginx (LEMP Stack) packaged by Bitnami

  • Django packaged by Bitnami

  • GitLab packaged by Bitnami (HVM)

    Windows

  • SQL Server 2016 Express

Get started now

You can do any of the following to get going: