Amazon Lightsail

Who owns it

Amazon Lightsail (Amazon Web Services, contracting with UK and EU customers through Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL in Luxembourg; launched 2016) is AWS packaged to look like a VPS: fixed monthly bundles with compute, storage and transfer included, static IPs free while attached, snapshots at $0.05 per GB, managed MySQL and PostgreSQL from $15, an $18 load balancer, containers, object storage from $1, and a console simple enough for someone who does not want to learn AWS. It is available in London and in Ireland, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm and Spain. Prices in US dollars only, tax-exclusive, read 8 September 2026: the smallest bundle is 2 vCPU, 512 MB and 20 GB with 1 TB of transfer for $5 a month (1 GB for $7); the reference 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 80 GB bundle with 4 TB is $24. Add one retained 80 GB snapshot at $4 and the real monthly cost is $28, prorated hourly and capped at the bundle price. Transfer beyond the bundle is charged at $0.09 per GB in most regions, ten times Vultr's rate, and the support plans are AWS's: Basic covers account and billing only, and anything technical starts at Business Support+ for $29 a month. There is no Kubernetes, no dedicated CPU, no GPU, and no Lightsail-specific MCP server, though the general AWS MCP server covers it.

What to know

The reason it is last is the blueprints, and it is the reason we stopped using it. Lightsail's one-click application images (WordPress, WordPress Multisite, LAMP, Nginx, Node.js, Django, GitLab CE, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, Ghost, PrestaShop, Redmine and the MEAN stack) were packaged by Bitnami, which Broadcom now owns. On 20 May 2026 Broadcom announced that "effective June 10, 2026, Bitnami-packaged containers, Helm charts, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) will no longer be available through the AWS Marketplace, AWS Lightsail Blueprints, and Elastic Container Registry", and that "while existing Amazon EC2 and Lightsail instances will continue to run, they will stop receiving updates after May 20th, 2026". Three weeks' notice, then no more security patches for the image your business runs on, with a paid Bitnami Secure Images subscription offered as the upgrade path. AWS has built its own native blueprints for the five most popular stacks, and its blueprint catalogue page still listed the Bitnami versions without an end-of-life notice when we read it on 8 September 2026. Everything else about Lightsail is adequate; that one thing turned into full migration projects for several of our clients, and it is the risk this whole category's "vendor-maintained images" column exists to expose.

What you get and what to watch

Trustpilot for aws.amazon.com is 1.3 on 420 reviews, AWS-wide rather than Lightsail-specific, with billing surprises and unanswered tickets the themes. On the wider record, the 20 October 2025 US-EAST-1 outage lasted about 15 hours. Lightsail is a fair product for someone already committed to AWS who wants a fixed bill; for a small business choosing a server today, every provider above it does the same job with fewer surprises.

In our experience: we ran client workloads on Amazon Lightsail and EC2 and moved them away because the images were not maintained. Bitnami's WordPress and application stacks stopped receiving updates, and rather than run unpatched servers we migrated the clients, which were major projects in their own right. Broadcom's May 2026 announcement made the same thing official for everyone. That experience, not the price list, is why Lightsail is last. Saaskly has no commercial relationship with AWS.