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AWS launches Amazon Lightsail, a DigitalOcean Killer offering virtual private servers starting at $5 a month

ASW Lightsail

Amazon Web services (AWS), the king of cloud computing business announced Amazon Lightsail, a VPS service starting just at $5 a month. At its  AWS re:invent conference Amazon announced this service which has the potential to kill DigitalOcean VPS services.

DigitalOcean, a New York based company known for its low-cost, easy to setup and high performance VPS  services is the second after AWS in IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) market. In the past few years, the growing popularity of DigitalOcean forced companies like Amazon to rethink their market strategies and expand their offerings according to latest trends in the market. Amazon Lightsail directly competes with DigitalOcean in pricing as well as performance and hence is threat to companies like DigitalOcean and Linode.

Aws is know for handling high traffic, complex applications and isn’t as simple as a VPS to setup and deploy applications.  It is also quite costlier as compared to DigitalOcean and Linode. With Lightsail, Amazon aims to expand and capture VPS market so as to retain it’s No.1 position in Cloud computing business.

According to Jeff Barr, “Some people like to assemble complex systems (houses, computers, or furniture) from parts. They relish the planning process, carefully researching each part and selecting those that give them the desired balance of power and flexibility. With planning out of the way, they enjoy the process of assembling the parts into a finished unit. Other people do not find this do-it-yourself (DIY) approach attractive or worthwhile, and are simply interested in getting to the results as quickly as possible without having to make too many decisions along the way.”

In Lightsail, with a couple of clicks you can choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address. You can launch your favorite operating system (Amazon Linux AMI or Ubuntu), developer stack (LAMP, LEMP, MEAN, or Node.js), or application (Drupal, Joomla, Redmine, GitLab, and many others), with flat-rate pricing plans that start at $5 per month including a generous allowance for data transfer.

Though its still not clear whether Lightsail will have features and offerings like ELB(Elastic Load Balancing), Auto-Scaling which original AWS plans have, but these are not the services which majority of its customers require.

Most of the features like adding SSH keys to servers prior configuring and launching them etc are been included in Lightsail. It would be interesting to see how companies like DigitalOcean and Linode respond to  Amazon Lightsail and its offerings in coming months if not years.

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Vineet Suratran
Vineet Suratran
Vineet Suratran is Founder and Editor-In-Chief at venturedawn.com. He is an Electronics & Telecommunications Engineer by profession and blogger by passion.

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