Why use Lightsail for Wordpress hosting ?

Most standard hosting sites will offer you hosting as cheap as 3$/month for Wordpress instances. They usually come with limits such as 2GB storage, 100GB data download and so on. AWS Lightsail combines Bitnami's hosting offered through AWS with all the standard AWS features. Unlimited data transfer (they are charged) and the ability to scale your storage to 100s of GBs in minutes! All of this and the ability to leverage AWS advanced infrastructure all starting at the cost of 3.5$/month.

But AWS already has EC2 instances

Although AWS already offers the all capable EC2 compute instances, Lightsail is AWS way of competing with DigitalOcean and other competitors which offer One Click app installations.

Login to your AWS account and click on the Services button in the Navbar

Click on the Lightsail link as shown below

Create the Wordpress Instance in the Lightsail Dashboard

1. Click on the Create Instance Button in the Lightsail Dashboard
2. Choose the OS and the App image to be installed
3. Choose the pricing plan. The default plan is $3.5/month
4. Now enable Automatic Backups - choose the time at which you expect the least activity to occur on your instance
5. Add a unique name to your instance - with the ease of creation of instances you will often forget which is which
6. Click on create instance button

Your instance is now being created

It should appear like this once its been created.

Lets add a static IP to the instance

Adding static IP makes sure that your instance will always have the same IP atttached to it. This can be very useful for DNS

1. Click on the Instance and go to the Networking tab\
2. Click on the Create Static IP button
3. Enter a unique name to identify your static IP
4. Create the IP
5. You can verify its creation in the Networking tab of the instance.