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
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
Linux
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows
CMS applications in Lightsail
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
Linux
E-commerce and project management applications in Lightsail
Magento packaged by Bitnami (eCommerce)
Redmine packaged by Bitnami (Project Management)
Linux
Development stacks in Lightsail
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)
Linux
SQL Server 2016 Express
Windows
Get started now
You can do any of the following to get going: