Providers of low-costs virtual private servers (VPS) are facing a major new competitor this morning, as AWS announced the new Amazon Lightsail service at the re:invent conference this morning in Las Vegas.
Lightsail allows users to skip most provisioning details to spin up a virtual server in the cloud. You don’t need to specify settings like storage, security or identity management. Rather a user can just pick the size of the server and get a server running in just a few clicks.
The move is a competitive response to VPS providers like DigitalOcean, Linode and Bluehost, and isn’t something that the other major cloud providers are offering yet. Pricing is competitive, starting at $5/month and up to $80/month, depending on the configuration chosen.
You can learn more about Amazon Lightsail here.