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AWS Lightsail vs UpCloud
UpCloud starts $1.50 per month cheaper at the entry tier. AWS Lightsail lists more regions, which matters if latency to a specific city is your constraint. AWS Lightsail is the better pick for teams who want AWS on the invoice and a plausible growth path, at Droplet prices for the first year.
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.
UpCloud
$3.50/mo entry
Workloads that need consistent IOPS or heavy egress without a bandwidth-priced surprise at month end.
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 | UpCloud | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan price / month | $5.00 | $3.50 | UpCloud |
| Entry plan vCPU | 2 | 1 | AWS Lightsail |
| Entry plan RAM | 0.5 GB | 1 GB | UpCloud |
| Entry plan storage | 20 GB | 10 GB | AWS Lightsail |
| 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 on all plans; the same team backs the paid Managed Databases product. | |
| Billing | Hourly metering, capped at the listed monthly price for the bundle. | Hourly, capped at 28 days (672 hours) per calendar month. Prices are published in euros and US dollars. | |
| 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. | 30-day free trial available for new accounts; no permanent free tier. |
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 | UpCloud | 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. | $3.50Starter 1GB · 1 vCPU · 1 GB · 10 GBEntry Starter plan, with a per-customer purchase limit. Zero-cost egress under the Fair Transfer Policy. | UpCloud cheaper by $3.50 |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $24.00General 4GB · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 80 GBStraight lift of the DigitalOcean 4GB tier, on AWS invoicing. | $14.00Starter 4GB / 2 vCPU · 2 vCPU · 4 GB · 30 GBThe tier that reads as a direct swap for the DigitalOcean 4GB Droplet. | UpCloud cheaper by $10.00 |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $84.00General 16GB · 4 vCPU · 16 GB · 320 GBFirst general bundle with four vCPUs. | $24.00Starter 8GB / 4 vCPU · 4 vCPU · 8 GB · 40 GBFour cores at 8 GB. | UpCloud cheaper by $60.00 |
| 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. | no plan this size | — |
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.
UpCloud
UpCloud is a Finnish independent cloud that competes on storage performance and transfer terms rather than headline price. Its MaxIOPS storage tier and zero-cost egress policy make it a natural upgrade from a budget host if you have hit an IOPS ceiling or a fair-use letter about egress. It publishes a global US dollar price for every plan as well as a euro price; we list the dollar price, read daily from UpCloud’s own price calculator.
Strengths
- Zero-cost egress across every product, subject to a Fair Transfer Policy
- MaxIOPS storage tier reaches up to 100k IOPS, unusual at this price band
- Fixed-price Starter plans as an on-ramp; billed by the hour, up to a 28-day monthly cap
- 99.99% SLA on Starter and 99.999% on Cloud Native and above
Weaknesses
- Helsinki costs more than the other zones for the older General Purpose, High CPU and High Memory plans
- The 1GB Starter is limited to five concurrent deployments per customer
- Region map is smaller than DigitalOcean’s despite the premium positioning
- Ecosystem is smaller: fewer marketplace images and community tutorials than the big names
Support: Ticket support included on all plans; the same team backs the paid Managed Databases product.
Billing: Hourly, capped at 28 days (672 hours) per calendar month. Prices are published in euros and US dollars.
Free tier: 30-day free trial available for new accounts; no permanent free tier.
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 | UpCloud |
|---|---|---|
| Plan (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | $24.00 | $14.00 |
| 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 UpCloud.
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 UpCloud both have data centres in these places. Each page ranks every provider there at the price charged in that location.
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AWS Lightsail vs UpCloud — 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 UpCloud?
- UpCloud Starter 1GB at $3.50/mo, which is $3.50 (50%) less than AWS Lightsail General 1GB at $7.00/mo.
- How many datacentre locations do AWS Lightsail and UpCloud have?
- AWS Lightsail lists 20 and UpCloud lists 15.