Amazon Lightsail - Simple Easy Way To Host WordPress

It is always challenging to find out good hosting solution which is secure, easy, and also cost-effective. Amazon LightSail is the destination of all your findings. It is one of the best Cloud Server that provides reliable secure service at the cheapest cost. In this post, we are going to host a WordPress site in a few basic steps.

Before starting in detail let’s first visit the AWS Lightsail by URL https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

Now, once you visit the site the first curious questions you might be thinking of the pricing so, let me share that as you can see in the above image first 3 months are free then the basic Linux plan starts with $3.50/month, and windows start with $8/month.

Amazon always tries to give better performance and services so periodically they are adding better and better configuration but as the configuration of machines increases obviously, the price will also increase slightly. To know more about the different plans you can visit https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

I am assuming till now you have registered for the trial and want to host your first WordPress site. so let’s get started.

After login the on the first screen, you will find Create new instance option as shown in the below image

Now, just click on create instance. you will get a new screen where you have to select instance location. By default, the location would be your near availability zone but you can change it at your ease.

Once you select the location, in the next step we have to pick up the instance image. Where we have 2 options either Linux or Windows. As we are going for a quick WordPress hosting solution. We prefer Linux.

After selecting the OS which is Linux, we will have a few other options where we can select predefined images which we can install on our Linux instance. See the below image where we have different options available. Here we are selected WordPress (first option)

Once the WordPress option is selected, in the next option we have the SSH key. If you are not aware of the SSH key then don’t worry. Just think of it as an encrypted password that we can use to access our Instance (VM)

To make it simple, we will just download the existing default Key.

Once the SSH Key file is downloaded to our local machine. In the next step, we will select the configuration as shown in the below image. As our WordPress instance can run on 1 vCPU and 512 RAM so, we are happy to select the $3.5 plan which is selected by default. There are various instances available according to different configurations like Memory, Processing, Storage, etc. Once you are comfortable with the WordPress installation as per your need you can choose different plans and as mentioned AWS periodically adds new instances as well.

Now, in the next step, we will give an instance name. The instance name should be unique here. I am giving my instance name indiandotnetwordpress. Once you provided the instance name just hit the create instance button. In this way, your first WordPress instance is created.

Once you hit the Create Instance button in a few minutes our instance would be ready and will be available in the Instances tab. You can see below snap our instance in running condition.

Now, to check whether the WordPress was installed or not on our new instance. Just copy the IP address from the instance detail and browse it. If you see the above image my instance IP is 13.235.132.99

Let’s browse it

So far so good. Wow in a few steps we installed WordPress but the next question might be in your mind how to access the admin part of WordPress as we don’t know username and password.

So, to get a username and password just click on the SSH terminal option as shown below figure. Which will give the option to access our instance.

You will get the following screen.

Here, you have to write the following command and hit enter to get the password of your WordPress admin. The command is cat bitnami_application_pssword

Now, once the password is copied we can access WordPress.

For this again go to WordPress instance and use public URL as shown below

We are using a public URL and paste into the browser with the wp-login.php suffix. Below page would be open where we have to provide username as user and password which we copied.

Once you hit the login button you will be in the Dashboard of WordPress. Now, you can manage your WordPress.

So, far so good in this post we can host a WordPress site and be able to access it with public IP without any issue. In the next post, we will discuss some other aspects of light host configure domain name check CPU usage, etc.

Hope this post is useful for you. Please do post your comments.