Amazon Web Services Announces Private Servers Starting at $5 a Month

At the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services announced their new virtual private servers which will be available for as low as $5 a month.

The service for virtual private servers will be called Lightsail. According to AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, Lightsail was designed specifically for customers that want their own private servers without having to deal with any technical details.

You get 1 free month of usage if you choose the $5 package.

How To Set It Up

You only need to choose 3 things to start up your server through the service.

First you will be asked for what Operating System you want to use. You can choose from Ubuntu and Linux

Then you will be asked to choose from 5 different bundles each with different processing power, storage capacity, RAM etc.

Finally you just need to name your server and that’s all.

Package Details and Services

Everything is handled by the service itself. Launching the virtual machine, setting up the storage and the OS, etc.

There are 5 different packages available for you to use. The memory mentioned is the amount of RAM available. The transfer size is the amount of data you can transfer to/from the storage

1. $5 per month, 512 MB memory, 1 core processor, 20GB SSD, 1 TB transfer
2. $10 per month, 1 GB memory, 1 core processor, 30 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer
3. $20 per month, 2 GB memory, 1 core processor, 40 GB SSD, 3 TB transfer
4. $40 per month, 4 GB memory, 2 core processor, 60 GB SSD, 4 TB transfer
5. $80 per month, 8 GB memory, 2 core processor, 80 GB SSD, 5 TB transfer

All of these packages come with:

• Static IP Addresses
• Intuitive management console
• SSH terminal access
• SSH key management
• DNS management
• Server monitoring
• Access to AWS services

For more details you can visit this page.

People with a more techie background will prefer to choose each option for themselves and might ultimately want to tweak the options to fit their needs. For your average person or even a small business or startup, this could be perfect.

Click here to get started with Lightsail.