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NateWon

29 posts

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#2201776 19-Mar-2019 15:24

Just fired up a webhost setup on Lightsail, seems just as Good as Azure (setup was faster/easier) + Free Static IP on those offerings.
Will do some tests with some cloned client sites and see how it goes. The intended usage is mostly for website hosting at this stage. Have had some very large bills of late so simply trying to maximize performance and minimize cost.

timmmay

20589 posts

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#2201779 19-Mar-2019 15:30

Interested how you find light sail. I generally find the AWS control panel and server startup feels faster than Azure.

NateWon

29 posts

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#2201821 19-Mar-2019 16:06

timmmay: Interested how you find light sail. I generally find the AWS control panel and server startup feels faster than Azure.

Launching was definitely faster but resizing is not as easy as Azure. Had to recreate some Firewall entries and deattach/reattach an IP address, not overly complex but something Azure just does.

The UI of AWS isn't bad but obviously limited to my lightsail features currently, I think I prefer the one stop shop in Azure but its not bad at alll.

timmmay

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#2201832 19-Mar-2019 16:10

NateWon:

Launching was definitely faster but resizing is not as easy as Azure. Had to recreate some Firewall entries and deattach/reattach an IP address, not overly complex but something Azure just does.

The UI of AWS isn't bad but obviously limited to my lightsail features currently, I think I prefer the one stop shop in Azure but its not bad at alll.

Remember you're using the very cut down consumer Lightsail interface, not the full AWS interface. That's a good thing most of the time. Azure and AWS have a roughly equivalent feature set. AWS is more mature, it's quite a bit older than Azure.

Resizing an EC2 instance is as simple as stop, right click and choose new instance type, start, it takes about 10 seconds of effort plus stop / start time.

NateWon

29 posts

Geek

#2204340 24-Mar-2019 16:12

amanzi:

I'm a big fan of Vultr - they have a Sydney data centre which is about 37ms latency from Wellington.

Their pricing is here: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

I did a lot of research before selecting them - they have great performance and features.

And if you're thinking of trying them out, here's a referral link that will give you US$50 free credit: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7788250-4F

Thanks amanzi, It looks like there are some quite concerning operational issues with Lightsail - apparently they are T2 machines which are CPU limited instances that allow for X amount of CPU usage.
I'm not sure on the limitation of such as the Lightsail interface doesn't have any indication of available credits left etc. My tests started out promising however for some reason (unknown) the response times dropped considerably after the first day. So not that confident these will do the job well. Though they can be upgraded to normal EC2 instances the pricing and attempting to navigate the documentation of AWS is terrible. I do think the pricing and ease of setup is good, and likely will be using them for some burstable instances but they do not suit my requirements as a standard web server.

With Vultr I'm keen to give them a go - just to be clear, the offerings from Vultr are simply a VPS without CPU limitations? (Voucher did work)

Thanks

timmmay

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#2204371 24-Mar-2019 18:49

It makes sense the Lightsail instances are T2, but if they don't clearly say you get fractional CPU then that's not particularly up front or honest. After using a lot of CPU, say busy PHP sites, you would run out of credits. Not being able to see the credits is annoying. Some discussion here. You generally get what you pay for though. I use a t2.nano which is 5% of a CPU, and it runs four fairly quiet websites no problem - Nginx, PHP, MySQL.

AWS documentation is generally awesome. There's a lot of it, and it's complex, so unless you have enough knowledge of the basics it won't make much sense. I haven't looked at Lightsail documentation though.

If it's not working for you then Vultr / Digital Ocean are good options.

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