Best way to host multiple websites on Amazon Lightsail in 5 minutes

What is Amazon Lightsail?

In simple terms, consider Amazon Lightsail as an EC2 instance which is very easily deployable bundled with pre-installed software like LAMP, WordPress, Joomla, Node.js, Magento and more applications and these instances also come with ‘OS Only’ instances too.

You can select Linux / Windows OS and optionally select an App which will be pre-installed on the instance.

Why Amazon Lightsail?

The main advantage of Amazon Lightsail is its fixed monthly price. No surprises here, its simply WYSIWYG (What you see is What you get). There are different options from which you can select an instance based on Memory, Processing, Bandwidth, Storage or Transfer rate. Prices start from $3.5 per month.

Why setup hosting for multiple websites on a single Amazon Lightsail instance?

Good Question 🙂

Sometimes we run small websites, websites which do not have many visitors but then are very critical — for example a company website, which may only be a showcase of what the company does and what it stands for and someone may have different companies and different websites. Most of the web hosts have shared hosting, which sometimes makes the websites lag and load slow and may have other problems associated to a shared hosting.

Hosting multiple websites on a single instance will save us money, the resources that they share among themselves are limited (to the sites that are hosted on the instance). This is like a VPS hosting only with a lot of control in our hands. A user can work on the server, tweaking & configuring and updating the server as required.

Considering the advantages or pricing and the freedom to do with the server as we please makes Amazon Lightsail a good choice to host multiple websites.

We will use Plesk Obsidian Web Admin Control Panel SE Free edition

There are quite a few Control Panels available online, some are paid like CPanel and some are free like Vesta CP, ISPConfig. We are not going to compare the benefits or disadvantages of all those. Rather, we are going to provision an instance with the Plesk Obsidian Control Panel, which is free and very simple to use.

Steps to setup multiple websites hosting on Amazon Lightsail instance

Part 1

Provision a new Amazon Lightsail instance with the following options selected :

1. Select a Region from the instance location option (select the one closest to your site visitors).
2. For Platform select Linux / Unix
3. From the ‘Select a Blueprint’ option select ‘Apps + OS’ and ‘Plesk Hosting Stack on Ubuntu’
   • Optionally add ‘launch script code’ to the instance and change the SSH Key pair
4. Select an instance plan (a minimum of 1 GB is required to install plesk )
   • Optionally name your instance and add key pair values for identification or marking purposes
5. Click on the ‘Create Instance’ button to create a new instance.

Part 2

1. Connect to the newly provisioned instance

See how to connect to the Amazon Lightsail instance

2. at the command prompt type :

ubuntu@ip-172-26-9-251:~$sudo plesk login

You will receive 2 urls. Copy either 1 url from the command prompt and paste it into your browser.

2. You’ll see a screen as follows:

3. Fill in the login details to get access to the Plesk Control Panel.

4. Start configuring a domain

5. To add a new website, configure a new domain repeating the whole process.

Plesk allows you to access files through its file manager, phpMyAdmin, FTP, SSL and more.

Triolutions is a solution provider for WordPress and AWS and is based in Teaneck, New Jersey, USA. Contact Triolutions for any queries or help related to hosting multiple websites on an Amazon Lightsail instance.

Let us know your thoughts on the comments below.