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Cloud VPS vs AWS: where a flat-price VPS beats EC2 or Lightsail, and where it does not.

AWS meters the instance, the disk, the address and every gigabyte that leaves. A flat-price VPS folds those into one number: VPS-1 is $9.90 a month with 1 TB of transfer included, and renews at the same price. Which is cheaper depends on how steady the load is and how much goes out. Here is the arithmetic, and the cases where AWS is the right answer.

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Side by side

What each one charges for, and what it folds in.

Our column is read from the catalogue the cart charges from. The AWS column quotes only what AWS prints on its Lightsail and EC2 On-Demand pricing pages, read on 2026-10-09; where AWS's rate depends on the region, the row says so rather than picking one.

  • What the price covers

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    EC2 prices the instance per second by region; the disk, the public IPv4 address and outbound data are separate lines. Lightsail bundles memory, vCPU, SSD and a transfer allowance: from $5.00 a month for 0.5 GB, 2 vCPU, 20 GB SSD and 1 TB with a public IPv4, or $3.50 with IPv6 only
    Flat-price VPS
    One price per plan per city. VPS-1 is $9.90 a month for 1 vCPU, 1 GB, 25 GB SSD, one IPv4 and 1 TB of transfer. No setup fee, and the renewal is the same price

  • Outbound data

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    Metered per GB. EC2 gives 100 GB out to the internet free a month across the account, then tiered per-GB rates that depend on the region. Lightsail counts inbound and outbound against the allowance, charges only outbound beyond it, and halves the allowance in six regions; AWS's own example prices overage at $0.09 a GB in US East (Ohio)
    Flat-price VPS
    A stated allowance on the metered lines, 1 TB on VPS-1, and no meter at all on the Unmetered line. Outbound only is counted, and going over does not cut you off: we get in touch first

  • Billing unit

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    EC2: by the second, with a 60-second minimum, from launch until the instance is stopped or terminated. Lightsail: a monthly bundle price
    Flat-price VPS
    Hourly or monthly. The hourly rate is the monthly price divided by a month, $0.0136 an hour for VPS-1, and it stops when you destroy the machine

  • Public IPv4

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    A separate charge on EC2: AWS's page says all in-use and idle Elastic IP addresses are charged, at the rate on its VPC pricing page. Lightsail prices its IPv4 bundles above its IPv6-only ones
    Flat-price VPS
    One IPv4 address included on every plan, for the life of the server

  • Disk and snapshots

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    EC2 storage is an EBS volume priced on its own page. Lightsail includes an SSD in the bundle, sells block storage at $0.10 per GB a month and snapshots at $0.05 per GB a month
    Flat-price VPS
    25 GB SSD included on VPS-1. No snapshots in the panel yet; nightly backups at 20% of the plan price on the plans and cities that offer them

  • CPU

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    The burstable T families run on CPU credits; in Unlimited mode AWS charges $0.05 per vCPU-hour for Linux on T2 and T3 when the credits run out. Other families are priced per instance type and region
    Flat-price VPS
    Shared vCPU on the Standard line. The Dedicated CPU line pins cores to you: DC-8 is $71.90 a month for 2 pinned vCPU and 8 GB, with no credit meter on either

  • Around the machine

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    IAM, VPCs and security groups, autoscaling with no fee of its own (the instances it launches and their CloudWatch monitoring are charged), managed databases, object storage, queues and the rest of the catalogue, and the compliance programmes AWS publishes
    Flat-price VPS
    A Linux (or Windows, where offered) machine with root and a browser console. No IAM, no private network between servers, no managed services of that kind, and no API

  • Where

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    AWS's regions, with instance prices, egress rates and Lightsail allowances that differ from one region to the next
    Flat-price VPS
    72 locations, 59 of them on the classic lines, with the price printed per city before you order

  • Getting started

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    AWS's Free Tier covers getting started with EC2 and with Lightsail, on AWS's terms
    Flat-price VPS
    No free tier. The cheapest machine we sell is $6.90 a month, and the cheapest way to try one is by the hour

  • Ready when

    AWS (EC2 or Lightsail)
    Launched from the console or the API; AWS's pricing pages do not state a time, so neither do we
    Flat-price VPS
    Online in under an hour after the order is paid

The arithmetic

One machine, all month, with real traffic.

The bill that separates the two is the outbound one. This is our live price for the cheapest Standard plan against AWS's published model, in words and in AWS's own figures.

On a flat-price VPS

VPS-1: $9.90 a month, or $0.0136 an hour, for 1 vCPU, 1 GB and 25 GB SSD, with one IPv4 and 1 TB of transfer included. Month two costs the same as month one. That is the whole invoice.

On Lightsail

The smallest Linux bundle with a public IPv4 is $5.00 a month: 0.5 GB, 2 vCPU, 20 GB SSD and 1 TB of transfer, counted in both directions. The 2 GB bundle is $12.00 with 3 TB. Outbound beyond the allowance is charged per GB; AWS's own example uses $0.09 a GB in US East (Ohio), and six regions carry half the allowance.

On EC2

Four lines where we have one: the instance per second (a 60-second minimum) at a rate per type and region, an EBS volume, the public IPv4 address, and data out, which is free for the first 100 GB a month across the account and then tiered per GB by region. AWS does not print one instance price on that page, so this page does not either.

What the allowance is worth. VPS-1 includes 1 TB of transfer in its $9.90 a month. At the $0.09 a GB Lightsail overage rate AWS prints for US East (Ohio), that volume of outbound beyond a Lightsail allowance would be $90.00 (counting 1000 GB to the TB). The figure is the point, not a prediction of anyone's bill: the rate is region-dependent, and a workload that never moves the bytes never pays it anywhere.

If the CPU must not be shared. DC-8 on the Dedicated CPU line is $71.90 a month for 2 pinned vCPU and 8 GB, with no credit meter. The EC2 equivalent is a non-burstable instance family priced per type and region, so compare it in AWS's calculator for your region rather than against a number we would have to guess.

Choosing

Two short lists, and no hedging.

A comparison that only lists our advantages is an advert. AWS wins real cases, and they are listed first.

AWS is the right answer when

  • You need IAM: many people and systems with different permissions on the same account, audited.
  • The application leans on managed services, a managed database, object storage, queues, functions, so that the instance is a small part of the system.
  • The load is spiky and you want autoscaling to add and remove instances on its own; AWS charges for the instances it launches and their monitoring, not for the scaling itself.
  • A customer or regulator asks for the compliance programmes AWS publishes, and you need to point at them.
  • You are learning, or running something tiny, and the Free Tier covers it.
  • Machines live for minutes: per-second billing with a 60-second minimum is cheaper than any hourly meter for that.

A flat-price VPS is the right answer when

  • One machine runs all month at a size you already know.
  • A lot of data leaves it: downloads, media, backups, an API that other people pull from. The transfer is in the price, or unmetered on that line.
  • You want one line on the invoice, and the same line next month: VPS-1 renews at $9.90.
  • Nobody on the team wants to operate IAM, VPCs and security groups for a single server.
  • The CPU must not be a credit balance: the Dedicated CPU line pins cores from $71.90 a month.
  • You want it in one of our 72 cities, with the price printed for that city before you order.

Questions

The ones that come up after the table.

Is a VPS cheaper than AWS?
For a machine that runs all month at a known size, usually yes, and the gap is widest when a lot of data leaves it. VPS-1 is $9.90 a month with 1 TB of transfer included, and the renewal is the same price. On AWS the instance, the disk, the public IPv4 address and the outbound data are separate lines, and the outbound line is metered per GB. For a machine that exists for twenty minutes a day, or one that sits behind managed services you would otherwise have to run yourself, AWS can be the cheaper total.
How does AWS charge for bandwidth?
Per gigabyte out. On EC2, AWS's pricing page gives 100 GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month across the whole account, then charges per GB in tiers (the first 10 TB a month, the next 40 TB, and so on) at a rate that depends on the region. Lightsail bundles an allowance into each plan: inbound and outbound both count towards it, only outbound beyond it is charged, and AWS's own example prices that overage at $0.09 a GB in US East (Ohio). Six regions get half the stated allowance. Read on 2026-10-09.
What happens if I go over the allowance on your plans?
Outbound only is counted against it, and going over does not cut you off or add a line to the invoice: we get in touch first, and the honest outcome for a machine that has outgrown its allowance is a move to a plan that fits. The Unmetered line has no allowance at all: the port speed is the only ceiling.
Is your hourly billing the same as EC2's?
Close, with two honest differences. EC2 bills per second with a 60-second minimum; we bill by the hour, and the hourly rate is the monthly price divided by a month rather than marked up, so VPS-1 is $0.0136 an hour. Hourly here needs a credit balance to draw on, and a few plans are monthly only because their supplier bills us a whole month up front; the configurator says which.
Can I run the same software on a VPS that I run on EC2?
If it is Linux software that runs on one machine, yes: you get root, your own IPv4 address and a browser console. What you do not get is the platform around the instance. There is no IAM, no managed database or object storage of AWS's kind, no autoscaling group, no private network between our servers, and no API. If your application leans on those, the VPS is a different product, not a cheaper version of the same one.
Can I use both at once?
Many people do: the steady, bytes-out part on a flat-price VPS, the spiky or managed parts on AWS. Traffic between the two crosses the public internet, so it counts against the VPS plan's allowance where its line has one, and AWS charges its data-transfer-out rate on its side of the link.

Keep reading

The same decision from other angles.