AWS Now Offering Windows VPS On Lightsail

AWS, in trying to lure more developers to its Lightsail service, which it introduced in 2016, is now offering a choice of Windows VPS to users, with prices starting from $10. First month free.

This is the company taking another swipe at the hosting provider market, where companies like Linode, Vultr, and in particular, DigitalOcean, have witnessed some really strong growth lately.

Amazon has lathered these virtual private servers with SSD storage, DNS management, and a static IP address, making them ideal for people that want to use them for web and file hosting, as well as running Windows software.

Speaking of Windows, there are two flavors of the month here — Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 — which Amazon says can be up and running in minutes for .NET and Windows applications.

Up until now, only Linux based VPS were available.

Servers are available in five sizes, ranging from those with 512MB to 8GB of RAM, 1 or 2 vCPUs, and up to 80GB of SSD storage. Prices include the software licenses for these server versions of the Windows operating system.

Although things start at $10 a month, the top of the line box will run you $100.

And while some do not see this as true cloud computing, these old-school VPS boxes are real handy for use for legacy applications that can’t be migrated to the cloud. Not to mention, the static IP and DNS make this quick and easy for developers to set up a web testing or development environment.

Details here.