5 ways to save money on AWS Lightsail

I have been using AWS Light Sail for the past couple of months to host my WordPress website with nothing but praise for the service. Over those months I also made some unnecessary changes that inflated my monthly bill and also learned a lot along the way about the correct way to use cloud products.

The first 3 packages come with 3 months free which is a good way to test AWS Lightsail without actually worrying about payment. It would be rather unfortunate to go for the max package at $160 a month and to find out later that you have overprovisioned resources.

In my experience, I have found out that for a static wordpress site like mine which runs on 2 VCPuS and 2 GB of RAM, it runs fine with no lags and since I use a CDN most of the visitors access a cached copy reducing strain on the server.

The cloud comes with a double-edged sword that can either be good for you or ruin you. In my personal experience after completing the setup process I set up AWS WAF to protect my site from common web exploits and DDoS attacks but what I didn’t realize is that it comes at a cost and since I was using Cloudflare to manage my DNS settings it wasn’t really necessary. It's like hiring a security guard to guard another security guard who guards a bank, doesn't make sense.

In the cloud, snapshots cost money since storage is used to store them. In my case for a static site which changes less than 5 times a week, it only made sense to switch to manual snapshots once a week as a way of avoiding unnecessary charges.

The correct machine size will either mean the difference between a huge monthly bill or a more manageable one. some cases require the highest no of VCPUs and RAM but in most cases small is just fine. the cool thing about Light Sail is that you have access to CPU metrics that you can use to monitor usage against time and also set custom alarms to be notified if a certain threshold is being reached frequently signalling the need for an upgrade.

If you are running a production application you will need a static IP that needs to be reserved and attracts a small charge so having many reserved static IPs that you do not use adds extra charges. Monitor also the use of storage buckets and unused instances, they all attract a charge so make sure to clean up your environment of anything that is idle.

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