Amazon Lightsail

Lightsail has no intro price and no renewal price: the listed price is what you keep paying. The cheapest bundle with a public IPv4 address is $5/mo, and an IPv6-only bundle is $3.50/mo ($0.0047/hr). Plans are billed by the hour up to the monthly price, deleting early is prorated, and we didn't see a minimum term. Extra outbound transfer costs $0.09 per GB in the US and Europe and up to $0.17 in Sydney. The AWS Customer Agreement says fees exclude indirect taxes such as VAT, unless the law requires otherwise.

The AWS Customer Agreement says customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (except South Africa) sign with Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, at 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy, L-1855 Luxembourg. The default contracting company is Amazon Web Services, Inc., at 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, and some other countries have their own AWS company. The agreement gives registration numbers only for the Malaysian and Australian AWS companies, not for the Luxembourg or US one. The About page says AWS launched in 2006.

AWS runs a public health dashboard for all its services, broken out by region. The help docs say its service history shows all interruptions for the last 12 months, filterable by service and region. Its RSS feed listed 38 events between 1 Mar and 15 Sep 2026, none of them about Lightsail. The Lightsail FAQ says Lightsail itself doesn't guarantee an SLA, though its block storage is designed for 99.99% availability.

Every account gets free 24/7 help with account and billing questions, by web form or a call-back, plus the docs and the AWS re:Post forum. The contact page says technical support is unavailable on the free Basic plan. Business Support+ starts at $29/mo or 9% of your AWS bill, whichever is higher, with 24/7 phone, web and chat. It states response times from under 24 hours for general questions down to under 30 minutes when a business-critical system is down, and AWS says it makes every reasonable effort to meet these. We didn't see which languages support is offered in.

We didn't see a money-back period or a refund policy on the pages we read; the AWS Customer Agreement has no general refund clause, only SLA credits. You stop charges by deleting resources, as a stopped instance is still billed, and you end the agreement by closing your account. AWS bills monthly and must give at least 30 days' notice before raising fees for services you already use. After closing, you have 90 days to reopen the account.

Automatic snapshots are free to turn on for Linux instances and disks: Lightsail takes one a day, at a time you choose, and keeps the latest seven. You pay $0.05 per GB a month to store snapshots, and manual snapshots are kept until you delete them. Managed databases include free automatic backups with point-in-time restore over the past 7 days. You restore by creating a new resource from a snapshot, and we didn't see a restore fee. We didn't see a way to download a snapshot; the docs only describe exporting it to Amazon EC2.

The WordPress blueprint's setup wizard adds a free Let's Encrypt certificate and redirects HTTP to HTTPS, and free certificates also come with load balancers, CDN distributions and container services. Every instance has a built-in firewall, and disks and snapshots are encrypted at rest by default. AWS enforces two-factor login for the account's root user, with passkeys, security keys or an authenticator app. We didn't see malware scanning on the pages we read.

The docs list 19 AWS regions for Lightsail, six of them in Europe: Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm and Spain. You pick a region when you create an instance, and four regions, including Spain, must be enabled first. AWS's GDPR page says a data processing addendum covers the GDPR, with the EU standard contractual clauses built into the AWS Service Terms. Customers choose where their data is stored.

Every bundle lists memory, vCPUs, SSD storage and monthly transfer as numbers. The $5 bundle has 0.5 GB of memory, 2 vCPUs, 20 GB SSD and 1 TB of transfer; servers created on or before 29 Jun 2023 have 1 vCPU. Some Asia-Pacific regions and São Paulo include half the listed transfer. Managed databases, container services and object storage also list their resources as numbers. We didn't see "unlimited" used for resources.

The docs show WordPress's own Tools > Export for moving a site, and MySQL Workbench for exporting a managed database to a file. Snapshots can be exported to Amazon EC2, for free, but we didn't see a way to download a whole server image. Domains registered through Lightsail can be transferred to another registrar from the Route 53 console, and the Lightsail page says this in one sentence. The agreement keeps your content for 30 days after the agreement ends, once you've paid what you owe, and outbound transfer beyond your allowance is charged at the normal rate.