As a follow-on to my first post about Amazon Lightsail, here’s some additional information that I’ve discovered…

Lower Prices

They lowered the prices!  Yes, odd as it sounds, the prices for many instance sizes was reduced.  The most basic instance (512mb ram, 20gb SSD, 1 VCPU) only costs $3.50 / month.

Managed Databases

They added managed database. I haven’t dug into this much, but I probably will.  It’s not the cheapest though.  I think it costs $20 / month.

Sending Email

If you’re going to be sending email from your instance, two things to be aware of…

1. They have limits on how much outbound SMTP traffic you can use. Obviously this is to prevent spammers from abusing their service.  You can request the removal of this limitation.  Just visit the Request to Remove Email Sending Limitations form, fill it out with a reasonable justification, and it should get removed in a few days.
2. You can get a reverse IP address setup.  Follow the instructions on this page and it should be taken care of fairly quickly.

Expanding Resources

If you find the applications running on your instance running out of memory frequently (despite having a swap file or partition), you probably need to increase the memory allocation.  You can do this pretty easily…

1. Take a snapshot of your instance.  This can take a while, so it’s best to either shut down or quies your instance (shut down active applications so nothing changes).
2. Select the snapshot and create a new instance with it.
3. Choose an instance type that has more memory (which also includes more disk, data, and possibly CPU power).
4. The new instance will automatically power on and start using the additional resources.
5. Detach the static IP from your old instance and attach it to the new instance.
6. Verify everything is working on your new instance.
7. If everything is working, you can delete the old instance.

Note: You can only expand resources … you cannot reduce them.