I used to pay my hosting provider £215.28 a year for WordPress hosting (this site). I have just switched to Amazon Lightsail (on AWS) and will now pay approximately £32.16 a year on their cheapest instance plan.

This price is based on 512MB Memory, 1 vCPU and 20GB SSD.

I looked at a number of alternatives when considering the move but could not really find any downsides.

Amazon Lightsail is designed for users with less cloud experience and all of this could have been accomplished using the standard AWS services, however as far as I could work out this was by far the cheapest way to implement the service using exactly the same underlying servers.

Setup was really easy. I created a new instance for my WordPress site. Lightsail configured everything required to run WordPress. All that remained for me to do was to configure my domain name provider for markjesson.co.uk to use the name servers for Amazon Lightsail. Once that was done I created a Static Ip on Lightsail and associated that with my WordPress instance and then my domain name.

Removing the Bitnami Banner

To remove the Bitnami banner from your WordPress site run the following:

sudo /home/bitnami/apps/wordpress/bnconfig.disabled --disable_banner 1

And now reboot your instance in the Amazon Lightsail console:

Uploading a New WordPress Theme

Run the following command in your local SSH client to upload the new theme:

scp -i your-private-key.pem -r theme-files-on-your-local-machine bitnami@your.ip.address.here:/home/bitnami/stack/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/themes

Configuring HTTPS For Your Site Using Let’s Encrypt

To configure Let’s Encrypt for your site use the Bitnami HTTPS Configuration Tool and answer the prompts on the command line:

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool