AWS Lightsail vs PrivateByte

AWS Lightsail is Amazon's simple VPS product: fixed monthly bundles, a friendly console, and a door into the rest of AWS. If you are comparing AWS Lightsail with PrivateByte, the headline prices only tell part of the story. The bigger differences are how Lightsail's CPU is allocated, what happens past the transfer allowance, and what you pay for snapshots. This page lays the numbers side by side at matching RAM sizes. Prices checked October 2026.

The short version

• Lightsail gives you 19 AWS Regions, a large included transfer allowance, a static IP in the price, and a clean upgrade path into EC2 and the wider AWS ecosystem. Its small and mid bundles use burstable CPU with a per-vCPU baseline between 5% and 40%.
• PrivateByte costs less at every RAM size below, includes unmetered bandwidth with no overage, and includes DDoS protection, backups and snapshots on every plan. We run in three locations: Dallas (US), Amsterdam (Europe) and London (UK).

If you need a region we don't serve, or you know you will grow into AWS services, Lightsail is a sensible pick. If you want a predictable bill and fewer line items, read on.

Side-by-side at comparable specs

Lightsail figures are Linux/Unix bundles with a public IPv4 address, from the official Lightsail pricing page. PrivateByte figures are our monthly prices.

Two things stand out. Lightsail gives you more disk at each RAM size, and that is a real advantage if storage is your constraint. We give you more vCPUs at 8 GB and above, at a lower price, with bandwidth that isn't metered.

Burstable CPU: the difference that matters most

This is the part most comparisons skip, so it is worth slowing down.

Lightsail instances use a burst capacity model. According to AWS's own documentation, each instance continuously earns CPU burst capacity, spends it whenever it works above its baseline, and saves it up while it idles. The baseline is per vCPU:

AWS notes that its largest bundles, $384 a month and up, burst automatically without using burst capacity.

What does a 20% baseline mean in practice? On the $24 bundle, the two vCPUs can sustain about 20% each indefinitely. Above that, the instance spends saved capacity. A blog, a small API or a dev box that idles most of the day will rarely notice; it banks capacity while quiet and spends it on the occasional spike. That's what the model is designed for, and it works well for it.

Where it bites is sustained work: a game server with players on all evening, a CI runner compiling for twenty minutes, a scraper or queue worker running around the clock, video transcoding, or a busy database. Once saved capacity runs low, performance drops back toward the baseline. The "2 vCPU" on the label is real, but you are not buying two cores you can run flat out all day.

Our honest advice applies to any provider, us included: if your workload keeps the CPU busy for long stretches, benchmark it for an hour, not a minute. Run your real job, watch the CPU graph, and see whether throughput holds. A short test only measures the burst.

Bandwidth and overage

Lightsail's included transfer is generous. 3 to 6 TB a month at these sizes is more than most small sites ever use, so for many people overage never arrives.

When it does, it is billed per GB; Lightsail's own pricing example uses $0.09 per GB. To put that in perspective, 1 TB over the allowance is roughly $90, more than the cost of the 8 GB bundle itself. The workloads that cross these lines tend to be the ones that are hard to predict: a file or media server, a backup target, a video project, a site that suddenly gets shared widely, or a proxy or VPN serving several people.

PrivateByte bandwidth is unmetered with no overage. There's no allowance counter to watch and no per-GB line on the invoice. What you do have is a port speed per plan (100 Mbps on Flare up to 1 Gbps on Pulsar and above), which caps throughput rather than billing it. If your traffic is heavy and continuous, pick the plan whose uplink fits.

Snapshots and backups

On Lightsail, snapshots are billed at $0.05 per GB-month of snapshot storage. That is cheap for one small snapshot, but it compounds: keep a week of daily snapshots of an 80 GB disk and you're paying for whatever that storage adds up to, every month, on top of the bundle. AWS's own docs remind you to delete snapshots you no longer need because they are billed while they exist.

PrivateByte includes backups and snapshots free on every plan. Take a snapshot before an upgrade, roll back if it goes wrong, and it doesn't appear on the bill.

Regions

This is a clear Lightsail win. The Lightsail docs list 19 Regions: three in the US, Canada, six in Europe (including London, Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm and Spain), seven in Asia Pacific (including Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai), and São Paulo. Four of them are opt-in and must be enabled first.

PrivateByte runs in Dallas (US), Amsterdam (Europe) and London (UK). If your users are in Asia, Australia or South America, Lightsail can put a server much closer to them than we can today.

IPv4 pricing

Lightsail's standard bundles include a static public IPv4 address at no extra charge. Lightsail also sells IPv6-only bundles, which start at $3.50 a month and keep the same CPU baselines. They are a good deal if your service is reachable over IPv6 alone, but many users and services still need IPv4, so check before you choose one.

Every PrivateByte VPS comes with a public IPv4 address included.

When AWS Lightsail is the better choice

Lightsail genuinely wins in several situations:

• You need a region we don't have. Asia Pacific, South America, Canada or several European cities beyond London and Amsterdam.
• You live in AWS already. If your team uses IAM, Route 53, S3 or CloudWatch, Lightsail sits under the same account and billing, which simplifies access control and invoices.
• You expect to graduate to EC2. Lightsail can export instance snapshots to EC2 as an AMI and EBS snapshot. That's a real upgrade path to autoscaling, managed databases and the rest of AWS without rebuilding from scratch.
• You want more disk per dollar of RAM. Lightsail bundles ship with more storage at each RAM size.
• Your workload is spiky and light. A personal site or small API that idles most of the day fits the burst model well, and the large transfer allowance means overage is unlikely.
• You need enterprise procurement. Some organisations can only buy through an existing AWS agreement.

When PrivateByte is the better choice

• You want the lower monthly price at the same RAM. At 4 GB, Orbit is $7.99 against Lightsail's $24. At 16 GB, Pulsar is $27.99 against $84.
• You want more vCPUs at mid sizes. Comet gives 4 vCPU at 8 GB where Lightsail's $44 bundle gives 2. Pulsar gives 6 at 16 GB where Lightsail gives 4.
• Your traffic is heavy or unpredictable. Unmetered bandwidth with no overage means no $0.09/GB surprise.
• You want backups and snapshots without a storage bill. Both are free on every plan, alongside DDoS protection.
• Your users are in North America or Europe. Dallas, Amsterdam and London cover those well.
• You value the small conveniences. Deploy in under 60 seconds, a browser VNC console for when SSH won't connect, custom ISO uploads, a migration tool to move an existing server, and a Telegram bot to manage your VPS from your phone.

Migrating from Lightsail

Moving a typical Lightsail workload is straightforward. Back up your data and configs, deploy a PrivateByte VPS with the same distro, copy files over with rsync, point DNS at the new IP, and keep the Lightsail instance running until you are happy. Our migration tool can help with the copy. If you are running a web app, our guide to deploying a Node app on a VPS with HTTPS covers the reverse proxy and certificate side, and self-hosting Coolify gives you a Lightsail-style one-click app experience on your own server.

Comparing other providers too? See DigitalOcean vs PrivateByte, Vultr vs PrivateByte, Linode vs PrivateByte, and our roundup of the best DigitalOcean alternatives.

Deploy your VPS

Orbit is the closest match to Lightsail's $24 bundle: 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM, with unmetered bandwidth and free snapshots.

Common questions

Is AWS Lightsail cheaper than PrivateByte? Not at the sizes compared here. Lightsail's 4 GB bundle is $24 a month and our Orbit plan is $7.99. Lightsail's IPv6-only bundles start lower, at $3.50, but come without a public IPv4 address.

What is a Lightsail CPU baseline? It's the share of each vCPU an instance can use continuously. Above it, the instance spends saved burst capacity. The $24 bundle's baseline is 20% per vCPU, according to AWS's documentation.

Does Lightsail charge for bandwidth? Each bundle includes a monthly transfer allowance, 3 to 6 TB at the sizes above. Past that you pay per GB; Lightsail's pricing example uses $0.09 per GB.

Are snapshots free on Lightsail? No. Lightsail bills snapshot storage at $0.05 per GB-month. PrivateByte includes snapshots and backups on every plan.

Can I move from Lightsail to EC2 later? Yes. Lightsail can export instance snapshots to EC2 in the same Region. That upgrade path is one of Lightsail's real strengths.

Where are PrivateByte servers located? Dallas (US), Amsterdam (Europe) and London (UK).