The Free AWS LightSail Tutorials

AWS LightSail is one of the best cost-effective hostings which you can get from the market. Here are some of the tutorials which will help you extract most out of your hosting.

AWS LightSail has allowed many small and medium business owners to easily host their sites and reach to their customers. If you are planning to take a plunge and start hosting your site on AWS LightSail, here are some useful tutorial which will help you.

WordPress Server Management On AWS LightSail

AWS LightSail WordPress Install

The first and foremost task is to install and configure the WordPress on your new AWS LightSail instance. It offers multiple ways to install the WordPress on the server. You can either use Bitnami WordPress image or use Plesk to deploy WordPress site.

Install WordPress With Bitnami Image On VPS

Bitnami WordPress Install

Bitnami WordPress image comes with enterprise level security and speed optimisation. The image is preconfigured and optimised for WordPress. The only problem is non availability of visual control panel. Server management needs to be done with command line interface.

WordPress With Plesk

AWS LightSail offers a free Plesk license which allows you to install up to 3 domains on any server. It comes with standard WordPress kit to easily manage WordPress sites. This should be a good option for people who wants a visual control panel to manage their server.

Install WordPress With Plesk On AWS LightSail

Setup Email Service On AWS LightSail

One of the major drawbacks for AWS LightSail is that it doesn’t come with any management console or Email Service setup. You have to do that work and set up an email service so that WordPress can send the notifications out.

This is one of the important services if you are expecting to send status emails to your reader. WordPress also uses email services for its internal purposes like password reset services. So use the below mention guide and setup transnational email service on your new AWS LightSail instance.

Microsoft 365 Email Setup

We have used AWS SES services to setup WordPress emails. If you are using Microsoft 365 Subscription and would like to use that service to send emails from WordPress, here is a tutorial which can help.


Setup phpMyAdmin Access

One of the other things which you need to do is set up local access to back-end services. phpMyAdmin is one of those services.

AWS LightSail does not enable public access to back-end services like phpMyAdmin or Pagespeed Cache. You need to set up access so that you can easily access those services from your local computer.


Setup SSL Certificate

SSL certificate has become one of the necessary requirements for any site these days. Google and other search engines have started giving priority to mobile-first and secured sites.

So if you want to enable the SSL for your site, here is a handy guide that will help you. Use this tutorial to set up Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your blog or site.


Setup CDN Service

One other basic service which every site needs nowadays is CDN. You can decide which files you want to serve from your LightSail Server and which one you want to serve from CDN.

You can free up some server bandwidth and decrease the page loading time by moving all the static files to CDN. This will download these files in parallel with the dynamic content coming from your LightSail Server.


Setup Load Balancer To Scale Your Site

Once you have your blog or site set up correctly, you may want to include the Load Balancer to auto-scale your website based on traffic or resource availability.

This tutorial will help you understand the key concept of Load Balancing and how you can set up your WordPress site on the Load Balancer. You can decide to use server resource consumption or traffic as a key parameter to automatically share the traffic between your WordPress instances.


Setup AMP Page For WordPress Site

Before we close the setup of AWS LightSail, let’s talk about one more important thing for any WordPress blog – AMP Pages.

This tutorial will help you set up AMP pages for your blog and deliver them without error. AMP pages have started gaining an edge in SEO as they take less time to load. If you are worried about page loading time and not able to reduce on your main site, AMP’s are a good alternative.


Scripts To Automate Tasks

Once your server is set up, you will need to perform regular maintenance and renew SSL certificates. Some of that work which needs manual intervention can be automated with the help of shell scripts.

Here is a tutorial that will introduce to the concept and will create some of the basic shell scripts for you. Use this tutorial and automate your maintenance tasks on AWS LightSail.


Upgrade AWS LightSail Server

Once in a while, you need to upgrade your server to either add more resources or upgrade the server components. AWS LightSail comes with a pre-optimized image so upgrading server components can be a bit of work.

Here in this tutorial, we will check how you can easily upgrade the server or update the Bitnami image to upgrade server components.


Setup Podcast Hosting With AWS LightSail

If you are planning to setup Podcast on your blog, AWS LightSail can be a good solution to host your podcast also. It can be cost-effective which can also give you one year of Podcast hosting for free.

Check our guide how you can setup Podcast hosting with CloudFront distribution on AWS LightSail.

So these are some of the tutorials which will help you in managing your AWS LightSail instance.

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