I’ve been using Amazon’s Lightsail service for quite a while now and, in general, I’m quite pleased with it.

There are, however, a few things they really could improve on.

Software Updates

Some of the software they offer in the yum repository for Amazon Linux 1 (which is based on CentOS 6, I think) is kind of old.

Their postfix version is pretty old. They offer version 2.10.3 but the version on the postfix download site is 3.4.

Although they offer PHP 7.3, they don’t provide a mcrypt module for that version. Mcrypt is available for all the PHP versions they offer up to 7.2.

Resource Flexability

I appreciate the low price and easy implementation of Lightsail, but I really wish they would offer more flexibility with resources.

Specifically disk & memory.

I have a number of instances that don’t need a huge amount of disk but could do with additional memory.

They offer the ability to add disk storage, but it would be nice if Amazon would offer the ability to add memory.

I’d also like the ability to have a disk that I could share between instances (via NFS) that’s local to the region & availability zone. They have the AWS Elastic Storage service that provides that kind of feature, but I would like it to be available specific for lightsail.

Support

I really wish they would offer more direct technical support for the Lightsail service itself.

I’ve seen a lot of posts in the Lightsail forums complaining about instances that are stuck or unavailable. It takes the forum moderators days to respond sometimes.

For application problems they can charge for support … but if you’re paying for the service, and the service goes down, you should be able to get tech support.