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?

Four things.

1. The webservers for hosting the actual Deserted Chateau website
2. Load balancers, which allow us to use multiple webservers for the site (you can't do that without a load balancer!)
3. 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
4. A web server for hosting this documentation