Lightsail vs EC2: Key Differences and How to Choose

Pricing: fixed bundles vs. pay-as-you-go

Each Lightsail plan fixes the memory, vCPUs, SSD storage and monthly data transfer allowance, so the cost is predictable. You're charged by the hour, capped at the plan's monthly price.

EC2 bills each resource separately: On-Demand Instances by the second (60-second minimum), with EBS volumes, outbound data transfer and public IPv4 addresses charged on top. Steady workloads can save with Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, and interruptible jobs can use Spot Instances. It's flexible, but costs can run high if you don't manage them.

Data transfer: Lightsail includes an allowance

• Both inbound and outbound traffic count toward a Lightsail instance's allowance, but only outbound overage to the internet, or to AWS resources over public IPs, is charged. Inbound overage is free.
• Allowances are pooled across instances of the same plan in a Region. They reset monthly, and deleting and recreating an instance doesn't reset usage.
• Traffic over private IPs between Lightsail instances, or to AWS resources in the same Region, stays free even past the allowance.
• Plans in Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta, Malaysia, Hong Kong and São Paulo include half the allowance of other Regions.
• EC2 has no bundled allowance: inbound traffic is free and outbound traffic is billed per GB.

Public IPs and networking

A Lightsail instance's default public IP changes every time you stop and start it. Attach a static IP to keep the address fixed. Static IPs attach only to instances in the same Region, cost nothing extra while attached, and are billed hourly once left unattached for more than an hour.

EC2's auto-assigned public IPv4 address is also released when the instance stops, hibernates or terminates, and a new one is assigned on start. Use an Elastic IP when you need a fixed address. AWS charges for all public IPv4 addresses, including those on running instances and Elastic IPs.

EC2 gives you full control of VPCs, subnets, routing and security groups, while Lightsail hides them behind a simple built-in firewall. If a Lightsail instance needs resources such as RDS inside a VPC, enable VPC peering on the Lightsail account page; it can then reach resources in your default VPC over private IPs.

Instance options, images and scaling

• Sizes: Lightsail general-purpose plans go up to 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, plus compute- and memory-optimized plans. EC2 offers hundreds of instance types, including GPU and Graviton-based Arm instances.
• Purchase options: EC2 offers On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Spot. Lightsail offers fixed-price plans only.
• Storage: a Lightsail system disk's size is tied to the plan, though you can attach extra block storage. EC2 EBS volume size is independent of the instance type.
• Images and backups: Lightsail uses snapshots of instances and disks and can create new instances from them. EC2 uses AMIs and EBS snapshots.
• Scaling: Lightsail load balancers handle low-volume HTTP/HTTPS only (up to 5 GB and 400,000 connections per hour). EC2 pairs with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to add or remove instances with demand.

Which one should you choose?

Pick Lightsail when:

• you're running a blog, small website, MVP or test environment and want it live in minutes;
• you want a fixed, predictable monthly bill with data transfer included;
• you'd rather not design VPCs, subnets and security groups yourself.

Pick EC2 when:

• you need specific hardware such as GPUs, large memory or Arm, or more performance;
• you need automatic scaling, advanced networking, or tight integration with RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda and similar services;
• you want to optimize costs with Spot, Savings Plans and similar options.

If you're unsure, start with Lightsail. AWS provides an official path from Lightsail to EC2, so moving later is straightforward.

Moving from Lightsail to EC2

1. Create a manual snapshot of the instance in the Lightsail console.
2. Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane, expand the instance, and choose Export to Amazon EC2 from the snapshot's action menu.
3. Review the prompt and choose Yes, continue. Export time depends on the instance size; track progress under Exports.
4. When the export finishes, choose Create instance in EC2, or launch an instance from the new AMI in the EC2 console.

Exporting an instance snapshot creates an AMI and EBS snapshot in EC2, in the same Region only; copy the snapshot to another Region in Lightsail first if needed. The export itself is free, but the resulting EC2 resources are billed at EC2 rates, so delete Lightsail snapshots you no longer need.

Managing both in CloudPilot

CloudPilot supports EC2 and Lightsail in one web panel. For EC2 you choose the Region, Availability Zone, instance type and optionally a custom AMI; for Lightsail you choose a Region, image and plan. Both can create several Windows or Linux instances in one batch, and the options come from what your AWS account actually returns in each Region.

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