Skip to main content

Lightsail

Homepage

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

What is it?

Lightsail is AWS' simplified web server offering. In the past, Amazon EC2 was the only way to run webservers in AWS; it's still possible to do that, but it's advanced and requires a lot of careful configuration. 

Why did we choose it?

Besides the obvious part of integrating with other AWS services, Lightsail has very good pricing. Unlike EC2, Lightsail servers come with a lot of free bandwidth and a fairly low price for the computing power and network speed they provide, making them a very good choice for webservers.

What do we use it for?

A couple of things:

  • The webservers for hosting the actual Deserted Chateau website
  • Load balancers, which allow us to use multiple webservers for the site (you can't do that without a load balancer!)
  • A dedicated messaging server, for private messages and other 'real-time' events that need to be sent and received without constantly refreshing a page or using AJAX requests
  • A web server for hosting this documentation
Back to top