How To Host A WordPress Site On Amazon Lightsail — Smashing Magazine

A good chunk of all websites out there runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the most basic, a website will usually use Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 solutions (for computing power and data storage, respectively), and most likely also Amazon CloudFront (as the content delivery network [CDN] to distribute the assets).

This stack works very well and is super powerful, but it is not dead easy to set up, as each of these services needs to be configured to interact with one another. And once that’s done, we need to configure the operating system and install the CMS, and anything else needed to run our software.

If all we need is to launch a website quickly and easily (for instance, to show the website under development to our client or to test a WordPress plugin), spending time to set up all these separate AWS services could be a bit too much.

This is why AWS created Amazon Lightsail, a service that aggregates the other services (EC2, S3, CloudFront, and a few others) via a simplified user interface to launch webservers with everything installed and configured (for both hardware and core software) and ready to be used.

With Lightsail, we can have our website up and running in a matter of minutes.

Unlike most AWS services, Lightsail has a...