EC2 or Lightsail for my project?

Hi,

The big advantage of LightSail, as you notice it, is that it is AWS-Managed in terms of infrastructure. So, we do the "heavyweight lifting" for you and you can focus on your app rather than patching, scaling, HA, upgrades, etc. It has lots of value from my perspective!

Re. your scaling concern, it can be solved with LighSail Balancer: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/features/load-balancing/ It will also serve some HA and performances purposes for you app.

Best,

Didier

Based on your project requirements and future growth expectations, Amazon EC2 would be a better choice for your WordPress multisite setup. Here's why:

1. Scalability: EC2 offers over 400 instance types with varying RAM and vCPU sizes, which will allow you to scale beyond the 64GB RAM and 16vCPU limit of Lightsail's largest instance. This is crucial for your long-term plan of hosting around 100 WordPress subsites with numerous plugins.

2. Flexibility: EC2 provides greater flexibility to configure your workload and integrate with other AWS services. This could be beneficial as your project grows and requires additional resources or services.

3. Advanced networking: If you need advanced networking features in the future, EC2 is better equipped to handle these requirements.

Regarding the DNS records concern:

You can use an Elastic IP address with your EC2 instance to avoid changing DNS records when migrating from Lightsail to EC2. An Elastic IP is a static IPv4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing. You can associate it with your EC2 instance, and it will remain constant even if you need to change or upgrade your instance in the future.

For EC2, you'll need to consider costs for:

1. EC2 instances (compute)
2. Amazon EBS volumes (block storage)
3. Data transfer
4. Elastic IP addresses (if used)
5. Load Balancer (if needed)
6. Amazon RDS for managed database service (recommended for WordPress)

While EC2 might seem more complex and potentially more expensive initially, it offers better long-term value for your growing project. You can start with a smaller instance and scale up as needed, potentially using services like Amazon RDS for your database to improve performance and manageability.

To optimize costs, consider using EC2 Savings Plans or Reserved Instances for long-term commitments, and leverage Auto Scaling to match capacity to demand.

In summary, given your expected growth and the need for flexibility, EC2 would be the better choice for your WordPress multisite project, despite the initial simplicity of Lightsail. It provides the scalability and integration capabilities you'll likely need as your project expands.

Sources
Amazon Lightsail or Amazon EC2? - Amazon Lightsail or Amazon EC2?
Amazon EC2 – Secure and resizable compute capacity – AWS
Learn about Lightsail and its global availability - Amazon Lightsail