AWS has historically been a place for big companies and startups to deploy their services in a bill to the minute fashion. The premise is that you’ll save money and do not have to worry about all the other things that come with large server deployments.
Then in late 2016 Amazon announced Lightsail and that changed things. At first the prices were not competitive with all the VPS providers out there in the market which fields hundreds of competitors, but then more recently AWS dropped the prices by 50% and that changed the calculus. While you can sill get a lowendbox style VPS with 128M of ram, many bloggers who run their own VPS’s use larger amounts of RAM and disk space. Still to maintain up-time the challenge remains that your best up-time is going to come from one of the established cloud providers out there.
Servertoolbox.com and damninter.net are both websites I’d like to keep up at all times. damninter.net is beyond easy since it’s a single file php script that does one thing and does it well. ServerToolBox however, is a WordPress site which has some unique concerns when it comes to maximum up-time.
So what do you do with a website that needs to be up all the time? We’ll for starters you need:
- Load Balancer
- Multiple servers
- Redundant synchronized file system
So AWS lightsail brings in a lot of these items. You can get VM’s from 3.50/mo for 512mb of ram up to 64GB servers. You can get dedicated SQL instances that Amazon maintains, you can get load balancer, and they’ll host up to 3 DNS zones. If you want to do more you can always utilize AWS Route 53 DNS service which boasts 100% uptime SLA for pretty much .50/domain and .40 per million queries for a basic DNS setup.