WordPress S3 Offload

A few weeks (months?) ago, I notice a nice feature that came in for lightsail: Bucket Storage.

Basically this feature allows you to automatically attach S3 bucket to your lightsail hosts. That’s pretty useful as is will save some of your lightsail instance resources.

You can find information on how to setup this feature with wordpress in this tutorial.

So no tutorial here, just an review of this feature:

Why using it:

S3 bucket are not part of your lightsail instance, this means that when visitors comes on your page, delivering the media won’t create any load on your instance so it will be really useful to deliver static content like images, videos, etc…

You also keep the bucket private, and use it for backups.

Their are also option to connect to the bucket with aws credentials or making it available from any AWS account like any other S3 buckets.

Cost:

This feature is not really expensive, it’s even free the first year. But it’s provisioned, you choose your storage and throughput setting and you will pay for this even if you don’t use this fully.

The overall cost is still quite affordable, and I think that if your need exceed what is available, you would prefer to setup you whole architecture on AWS instead of lightsail.

Overall:

If you are hosting a website that hosts many media files, or if you want easy backup, this feature is for you. But for any other usage, requiring S3 Lambda Objects, fine access policies, I would move to a EC2 deployment with cloudfront and S3.

That’s a basic feature for basic usage, it has little to no overhead. I would use it as to goto for any wordpress instance in lightsail. But any other needs, I prefer handling it into AWS directly.