If there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs.

It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once again.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day

You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price

But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.

“EC2 or Lightsail”. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.