Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) designed to present an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan.
$3.50
per month
Amazon S3
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
N/A
Pricing
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Editions & Modules
512 MB Linux
$3.50
per month
1 GB Linux
$5.00
per month
2 GB Linux
$10.00
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon S3
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Features
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Lightsail
9.1
Ratings
12% above category average
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
8.90 Ratings
00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing
9.30 Ratings
00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Monitoring tools
8.80 Ratings
00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images
8.90 Ratings
00 Ratings
Operating system support
9.60 Ratings
00 Ratings
Security controls
8.90 Ratings
00 Ratings
Automation
9.60 Ratings
00 Ratings
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Lightsail
-
Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.0
Ratings
8% above category average
Universal recovery
00 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Instant recovery
00 Ratings
7.90 Ratings
Recovery verification
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Business application protection
00 Ratings
8.60 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations
00 Ratings
9.40 Ratings
Incremental backup identification
00 Ratings
9.30 Ratings
Backup to the cloud
00 Ratings
9.40 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression
00 Ratings
8.70 Ratings
Snapshots
00 Ratings
9.50 Ratings
Flexible deployment
00 Ratings
9.20 Ratings
Management dashboard
00 Ratings
8.10 Ratings
Platform support
00 Ratings
8.70 Ratings
Retention options
00 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Encryption
00 Ratings
9.80 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
It is best suited for the small applications which do not need much CPU powers to executes tasks and when integration with other AWS services but it is less suited for the applications which need very frequent auto scaling for the performance purpose, as AWS Lightsail did not support system downgrading so not recommend to use in this case.
For archiving old data that is infrequently accessed it is perfect. You can choose to let it go into cold/glacier storage which saves even further costs but at the expense of accessibility. I like that you can set access rules to automatically move it to the next storage tier after a certain amount of time that it has not been accessed. I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.
Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.
The biggest problem is to rename the bucket. There is no direct way to do it. One need to copy entire content to the different bucket with intended bucket name and then remove the old bucket. Sometimes it creates issues.
There is no direct way to upload .zip file and extract it to inside the bucket.
While uploading large files, sometimes you will find a drop of upload speed. I observe it so many times and while checking my internet speed, I find it absolutely perfect. So there must have something wrong on the AWS side.
My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots.
The UI could have some improvements (better filters) and there is a lack of some useful functionality, such as renaming an existing bucket: the latter is much needed in the context of rapidly evolving companies. Overall though, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is easy to use and to onboard people and tools to, thanks to its various APIs and flexibility.
It depends on your tier within Amazon on how great of support you get. For us we have a dedicated Point of Contact that is great in taking in what we need and discussing it with the S3 team. The best thing is features we need or suggest have a good chance of landing on their roadmap.
Amazon Lightsail is ideal for beginners looking for a low-cost VPS to try out new things. It's especially useful if you're at a hackathon and need a quick way to prototype a quick idea. I would never recommend Lightsail for any kind of production work. In terms of uptime, Lightsail has proved unreliable. Occasionally, the instance will simply crash or reboot at random. Without warning, Amazon will perform maintenance on your Lightsail instance. Lightsail's networking is likewise lacking, with no support for IPv6.
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backblaze provides a better price point in exchange for more focused functionality. S3 really shines in that it performs simple things astonishingly well, while also being flexible enough to stretch itself to other situations (data lakes, file mounts, backup/restores systems, web hosting, etc.).
Allows us to store large amounts of raw traffic from data providers to allow us to view data our systems received at particular times, in order to reconstruct inputs in case of errors
Is capable of storing very large amounts of data cheaply without material impact to our business