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AWS Lightsail vs OVHcloud
Entry prices are within a dollar of each other (AWS Lightsail $5.00, OVHcloud $5.35), so price alone does not decide it. AWS Lightsail lists more regions, which matters if latency to a specific city is your constraint. OVHcloud is the better pick for bandwidth-heavy workloads that would blow through a metered-transfer plan at another provider.
AWS Lightsail
$5.00/mo entry
Teams who want AWS on the invoice and a plausible growth path, at Droplet prices for the first year.
OVHcloud
$5.35/mo entry
Bandwidth-heavy workloads that would blow through a metered-transfer plan at another provider.
Specification differences
Entry plans compared line by line. Rows marked with a dash are preferences rather than measurable wins, so we do not pick a side on them.
| Attribute | AWS Lightsail | OVHcloud | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan price / month | $5.00 | $5.35 | AWS Lightsail |
| Entry plan vCPU | 2 | 2 | |
| Entry plan RAM | 0.5 GB | 4 GB | OVHcloud |
| Entry plan storage | 20 GB | 40 GB | OVHcloud |
| Listed regions | 20 | 15 | AWS Lightsail |
| Management model | Unmanaged (you run the OS) | Unmanaged (you run the OS) | |
| Support | AWS Basic Support included; paid Developer/Business tiers via the parent account. | Ticket support included; paid Business and Enterprise support tiers via the OVHcloud Control Panel. | |
| Billing | Hourly metering, capped at the listed monthly price for the bundle. | Month-to-month on the US VPS range, with lower per-month rates for 6- and 12-month commitments. Public Cloud instances are a separate, hourly-billed product. | |
| Free tier | AWS says you can get started with Lightsail for free under the AWS Free Tier, but its pricing page names no bundle or duration. Check the Free Tier terms before counting on it. | No free tier on the VPS range. |
Same size, side by side
The cheapest plan from each provider that meets each size, so the comparison is between equal servers rather than two entry plans. Prices include a separately-billed IPv4 address where the provider charges for one.
| Size | AWS Lightsail | OVHcloud | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 1 GB | $7.00General 1GB · 2 vCPU · 1 GB · 40 GBModest RAM but the bundled transfer runs ahead of DigitalOcean and Vultr at the same tier. | $5.35VPS-1 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 40 GBTwo vCPUs and 4GB for about five dollars. Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps public bandwidth. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $4.54. | OVHcloud cheaper by $1.65 |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $24.00General 4GB · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 80 GBStraight lift of the DigitalOcean 4GB tier, on AWS invoicing. | $5.35VPS-1 · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 40 GBTwo vCPUs and 4GB for about five dollars. Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps public bandwidth. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $4.54. | OVHcloud cheaper by $18.65 |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $84.00General 16GB · 4 vCPU · 16 GB · 320 GBFirst general bundle with four vCPUs. | $10.00VPS-2 · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 75 GBFour cores and 8GB for ten dollars, at 1 Gbps with unlimited traffic. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $8.50. The tier that most directly undercuts DigitalOcean. | OVHcloud cheaper by $74.00 |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | $164.00General 32GB · 8 vCPU · 32 GB · 640 GBEight vCPUs; double the 16GB bundle for a little under double the price. | $27.50VPS-4 · 8 vCPU · 24 GB · 200 GBEight cores and 24GB of RAM, unlimited traffic at 3 Gbps. Month-to-month price; a 12-month commitment lowers it to $23.37. | OVHcloud cheaper by $136.50 |
Every provider at these sizes, ranked: 1 GB RAM · 4 GB RAM · 8 GB RAM · 16 GB RAM
Where each one wins and loses
AWS Lightsail
Lightsail is Amazon’s answer to the DigitalOcean-style Droplet: a small set of flat-priced instances with a simplified console, bundled with the option to graduate onto the rest of AWS once you need a VPC, load balancer or IAM policy. The public-IPv4 bundles include a fixed monthly transfer allowance and there is a cheaper IPv6-only tier for people who can live without an IPv4 address. The catch is that the AWS Console’s reputation for complexity is not entirely fair to Lightsail, but the moment you outgrow it you inherit that complexity.
Strengths
- Flat monthly pricing with generous bundled transfer
- One-click upgrade path onto the wider AWS platform when you need it
- IPv6-only bundles a few dollars cheaper than the equivalent IPv4 tier
- Backed by AWS operational track record
Weaknesses
- Smaller-plan RAM and disk lag the budget-cloud peer group at the same price
- Add-ons like snapshots, load balancers and managed databases are billed separately
- Support is AWS-style ticket support, not developer chat
- Graduating to full AWS surfaces the complexity Lightsail was meant to hide
Support: AWS Basic Support included; paid Developer/Business tiers via the parent account.
Billing: Hourly metering, capped at the listed monthly price for the bundle.
Free tier: AWS says you can get started with Lightsail for free under the AWS Free Tier, but its pricing page names no bundle or duration. Check the Free Tier terms before counting on it.
OVHcloud
OVHcloud runs its own datacentres and its own network, which is why the VPS list price is denominated in USD and includes unmetered traffic rather than a monthly transfer allowance. The 2027 range replaces the older Value/Essential/Comfort/Elite naming with plain VPS-1 through VPS-4 tiers, all on NVMe storage. It is a serious alternative to Hetzner if you want unmetered egress and a wider region map, and it runs its own data centres in North America as well as Europe.
Strengths
- Unlimited traffic at 500 Mbps–3 Gbps depending on tier
- Prices set in USD on the North American site, no FX drift for the invoice
- NVMe storage across the whole VPS range
- Datacentres OVHcloud actually owns, including US and EU footprints
Weaknesses
- Two vCPUs on the cheapest tier is generous, but shared and inconsistent under load
- Support quality has an uneven reputation; documentation is thinner than DigitalOcean’s
- Add-ons like backups are billed separately (from about a dollar per month)
- Historic outage record (Strasbourg fire, 2021) is worth knowing about before you rely on a single region
Support: Ticket support included; paid Business and Enterprise support tiers via the OVHcloud Control Panel.
Billing: Month-to-month on the US VPS range, with lower per-month rates for 6- and 12-month commitments. Public Cloud instances are a separate, hourly-billed product.
Free tier: No free tier on the VPS range.
The full cost stack
What a server costs beyond its sticker price, shown for 2 vCPU / 4 GB. Only figures read from each provider's own documentation appear; a gap says “not captured yet”.
| Item | AWS Lightsail | OVHcloud |
|---|---|---|
| Plan (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | $24.00 | $5.35 |
| Automatic backups | not captured yet | not captured yet |
| Outbound traffic beyond the allowance | $0.09/GB over allowance | not captured yet |
| Smallest managed load balancer | $18.00/mo | not captured yet |
Sources: aws.amazon.com
Price changes we have logged
No tracked price change for either provider yet.
Full record at the change log.
Every plan
The complete plan ladders, with the date and source of every price, are on each provider's page: AWS Lightsail and OVHcloud.
All figures are the providers' own published list prices in USD, on-demand monthly. The index was last refreshed 2026-10-14, and every row shows the date its own price was read. Nothing here is live or negotiated pricing. Where a provider bills a public IPv4 address on top, it is added to the monthly price, the ranking and every cost per vCPU or per GB, and the row shows the parts: the server, any disk priced apart, and the IPv4 charge. Some prices exclude VAT or need a commitment; the plan notes say which. Check the provider's pricing page before you commit.
Related comparisons
Where both sell
AWS Lightsail and OVHcloud both have data centres in these places. Each page ranks every provider there at the price charged in that location.
- Cheapest VPS in the US
- Cheapest VPS in Canada
- Cheapest VPS in the UK
- Cheapest VPS in Germany
- Cheapest VPS in France
- Cheapest VPS in Singapore
- Cheapest VPS in India
- Cheapest VPS in Australia
- Cheapest VPS in Frankfurt
- Cheapest VPS in London
- Cheapest VPS in Mumbai
- Cheapest VPS in Sydney
- Cheapest VPS in Europe
- Cheapest VPS in Asia
- Cheapest VPS in North America
AWS Lightsail vs OVHcloud — frequently asked
Every answer is computed from this pair's own prices and costs.
- Which is cheaper for 1 vCPU / 1 GB, AWS Lightsail or OVHcloud?
- OVHcloud VPS-1 at $5.35/mo, which is $1.65 (24%) less than AWS Lightsail General 1GB at $7.00/mo.
- How many datacentre locations do AWS Lightsail and OVHcloud have?
- AWS Lightsail lists 20 and OVHcloud lists 15.