Comparison of CSPs
Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are organisations that lease their compute, storage, and networking capabilities to individuals and business entities. To determine which CSP I would use to host my blog infrastructure, I did a cost comparison between Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Microsoft Azure
Within Azure’s wide range of Virtual Machine (VM) sizes offering, the Bs-series are low-cost VMs that are suitable for less intensive workloads that may sometimes require a CPU burst when demand spikes. With that in mind, they would be suitable for a web application.
For the most basic B1LS instance which comes with 0.5GiB RAM and 1 vCPU, it would work up to USD$4.82/month.
AWS
For those whom are unfamiliar with AWS’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, the popular ones are their EC2 instances and Amazon Lightsail. While the story on the pros and cons of EC2 VS Lightsail instances is for another blog post, a comparison was done on the cost for either of the offering.
For the most basic t2.nano instance with 512MB RAM and 1 vCPU, it works up to about USD$5.27/month. A Lightsail instance with the exact same specifications has a flat rate of USD$3.50/month.
Decision
Just basing off the cost per month of hosting my blogging infrastructure, the obvious choice would be to go with Amazon Lightsail. Putting the icing on the cake is Lightsail’s ability to select a blueprint image when creating your instances.
With the appropriate blueprint selected, the Lightsail instance would contain the necessary apps and tools required to run any web application of your choice. In my case, the WordPress blueprint, packaged by Bitnami, was selected. After finally creating your instance, give it 5 minutes to boot up, and you’re ready to go.
6 replies on “Amazon Lightsail for Blogs”
Brilliant post! Love the simplicity and clarity. So what is the total cost of running the blog over one year?
I ve been hosting arunpc.com at WordPress.com for more than a decade. Now i am really tempted to move to LightSail 🙂
Thanks!
So the Lightsail instance will cost me $3.50/month, Route53 Hosted Zones are $0.50/month, and my domain is $12/year. That would work out to about $60 a year, which would be around $5/month! Personally I find to be very reasonable!
Absolutely! Cant agree more.
Nothing that important, but you could consider redirect for nestorlee.com by creating a CNAME to point to blog.netstorlee.com to prevent the ‘Page not found’.
Yes of course! I’m not sure why that slipped out of my mind… Thanks for letting me know!
Look forward for more posts! Keep writing! Cheers!