Amazon Lightsail is a great service to host your WordPress as an application and create a brand new website. The website created on Amazon Lightsail is fast, secure and easy to manage. It isn’t difficult to install and maintain the website, as a novice web administrator would imagine. A simple knowledge of the web is enough to install WordPress in Amazon Lightsail. Lightsail has been specifically developed to serve those webmasters who want to install web apps easily and run websites without spending hours on installing operating systems, web administration software, PHP & MySQL, and other services. Think of it as a pre-configured and managed Virtual Private Server but reasonable in terms of price. The cheapest plan starts at $3.50 and the first month is free. So, you can test as much as you want before paying for it.
You can access Amazon Lightsail here. Signup to it and add your payment details to get your account set up. Installing WordPress in Lightsail is as easy as installing any software in a series of steps. After your account is set up, you can set up a web server instance in different parts of the US and also in Canada, Ireland, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Mumbai, Seoul, and Singapore. You can pick the location depending on where the majority of your traffic comes from.
There are also options to pick a Linux/Unix build or a Windows build. The Linux Build starts from $3.5 monthly whereas the minimum price for a Windows build is $8. A Linux build is adequate for a WordPress website. We will look in detail about the configuration in the following steps.
After your account is set up, follow these steps:
- Hit the Create Instance link from your dashboard.
- Select an instance location that is suitable for you.
- Pick Linux/Unix as the instance image.
- Choose WordPress under Apps + OS.
- Choose the instance plan. $3.5 plan will do.
- Give a name to your instance, under Identify your instance.
- Press the Create Instance button to finish setting up WordPress.
After a few seconds, Amazon AWS will create your first WordPress instance. You can access it via the IP address that is provided to you. You can find the IP address in your dashboard under the instance name that was specified. Paste the IP on your browser address bar. It will load up your clean installation of WordPress with the “Hello World” post. It means that we have successfully installed WordPress in our new Amazon Lightsail instance. Next, you have to point your domain name to it so that everyone can easily access it.