Why Amazon Lightsail Is Bad for Web Hosting Customers

Amazon would like nothing more than to claim yet another marketplace for itself. Among the many in which they’re already the biggest fish, they’ve come to dominate the hosting infrastructure space with AWS. But providing the infrastructure to allow for web hosting isn’t the same as providing actual web hosting. And here I fear, is where Amazon has met its limits for reasons I will explain below. If you’re looking at the Amazon Lightsail offering for the first time and liking the low prices, let me pull back the curtain and show you why it won’t work for you.

Amazon’s Achilles Heel – Customer Service

Amazon thrives in marketplaces that can be automated. Most of their human-based customer support is e-mail based, and it’s pretty hard to get an actual person on a phone. And that person will a process-oriented sales or billing person. Not a technical wiz. The reason for this is simple – maintaining a customer service build of qualified humans is expensive. Probably the most expensive part of an organization. Amazon’s niche is low margins. And they can’t do that if they need to keep teams of live humans around on the phone.

And this is why web hosting as we know it today is out of its reach. Web hosting is an extremely customer-centric operation. When you wake up in the morning and find that your SSL certificate isn’t working for some reason or the other, you want to reach out to a human being who will fix it ASAP. It’s one of the reasons why customers like NameHero’s customer service.

You can purchase a customer support package from Amazon separately. At a nice $30/m price! That alone should tell you how they’ve gimped their service. Having the infrastructure is all well and good. But what do you do when something goes wrong? You have a business to run. And Amazon isn’t going to help you when the going gets tough.

Amazon Lightsail Doesn’t Configure SSL – It’s Manual

Today when you sign up for a hosting package with NameHero, you get a fully functional website with whatever software you want, ready for you to start designing and writing content. You don’t have to worry about security, backups, or complex things like SSL. NameHero does all the configuration for you.

But with Amazon Lightsail, these things are your headache. If you want to use Let’s Encrypt’s free SSL on your site, you need to use the console to generate the certificate manually and apply it to your site. And don’t forget that it expires every three months, so you have to remember to do this all over again. And god forbid you forget – your site will get flagged and scare users away!

Security is Your Headache Too!

NameHero’s cPanel tools like Imunify360 scan your site in real-time for threats and act immediately to neutralize them. NameHero also protects from other kinds of threats that seek to harm your site. As a result, you’re shielded from a large amount of spam that would otherwise hit your servers and affect your performance.

With Amazon’s Lightsail, this is – once again – your problem. You need to figure out and implement a solution, and also keep up-to-date with the latest best practices.

Amazon Lightsail Takes Away Business Focus

As a business owner, you want to spend as much time as possible on activities that bring you money. And running a website on Amazon’s infrastructure is a full-time job. I can guarantee that if you try this, you’ll be spending large chunks of your time managing the technicalities of your website, rather than working on what’s important – your bottom line. And for these reasons, Amazon’s Lightsail will never be a dominant player in the web hosting game until they change their fundamental paradigm of working.