AWS LightSail with 1GB Instance is slow. Why?

Initially my AWS Lightsail instance with 1GB RAM was performance very smooth.

Here is the configuration for the same

1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 40 GB SSD, Ubuntu

AWS charges $5 for the same which is very cheap. Though DigitalOcean is also an option available at same price.

I have few more websites to be deployed on AWS LightSail, After playing around with multiple instance, i concluded

1GB isn’t a lot of memory for a WordPress site with litespeed to run.

1GB is fine for running a static website. but if you need to run a dynamic website with database server (MySQL or MariaDB) you’re going to run out of memory quick.

A solution to this memory problem is

Add Swap Memory to instance

• There’s no built in way to add swap space, so here’s what I did
• Purchase an minimum amount of 8gb of additional storage that will cost $0.80 / month.Attach the storage to your Lightsail instance.
• Partition the storage and make the type Swap
• Run mkswap on the new partition.
• Add the swap partition to the fstab
• Run ‘swapon -a’ to activate the swap partition.
• Now you have an 1GB Linux instance with 8gb of swap space.

Upgrade your AWS LightSail Instance.

• There is not direct way to upgrade AWS LightSail Instance.
• Take a Snapshot of your instance and create a new instance with the Snapshot
• This resulted me with a 2GB instance running WordPress LiteSpeed on ubuntu

Tech support is minimal

If you’re going to use Lightsail you have to be prepared to manage the machine yourself and research solutions to problems on your own. They don’t provide tech support unless you pay for it.