Website Capacity Issues on Amazon Lightsail

To address your website capacity issues on Amazon Lightsail and prevent future crashes, there are several steps you can take:

1. Upgrade your instance: If you're consistently exceeding your burst capacity, it's likely that your current instance size is insufficient for your needs. Consider upgrading to a larger Lightsail instance with more RAM, vCPUs, and storage. This will provide a higher baseline performance and more burst capacity.

2. Implement caching: Utilize caching solutions for WordPress to reduce the load on your server. This can significantly improve performance and reduce resource usage.

3. Optimize your WordPress site: Remove unnecessary plugins, optimize your database, and compress images to reduce the overall resource consumption of your site.

4. Monitor your instance metrics: Regularly check your CPU utilization and burst capacity using Lightsail's built-in monitoring tools. This will help you identify patterns and potential issues before they cause downtime.

5. Consider load balancing: If your traffic is variable, implementing Lightsail's load balancing feature can help distribute the workload more effectively.

Regarding storing website data on an external source like an S3 bucket:

1. For media files: You can use plugins like WP Offload Media to automatically upload media files to S3 instead of storing them on your Lightsail instance.

2. For database backups: Set up regular backups of your WordPress database to S3 for added security.

3. For static content: Consider using a content delivery network (CDN) in conjunction with S3 to serve static content, reducing the load on your Lightsail instance.

4. Plugin data: Some WordPress plugins offer integration with S3 for storing their data. Check if the plugins you're using have this capability.

Remember that while offloading data to S3 can help with storage and potentially improve performance, it's not a direct solution for CPU and memory constraints. You'll still need to ensure your Lightsail instance has adequate resources to handle the core WordPress operations and database queries.

If you continue to experience issues after implementing these solutions, you might want to consider migrating to a more flexible service like Amazon EC2, which offers more customization options for your server resources.

Sources
My website is running super slow on Amazon LightSail 1 GB RAM 2 vCPUs 40 GB SSD instance but working decent on 8 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 160 GB SSD | AWS re:Post
Lightsail with 4 Wordpress sites stalling with high CPU load? | AWS re:Post
Lightsail instance goes down without any CPU surge | AWS re:Post

Hello,

Thank you for choosing Amazon Lightsail, besides the solution suggested by re:Post Agent above, you can also use Lightsail bucket to host wordpress static contents, check out this user guide for details: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lightsail/latest/userguide/amazon-lightsail-connecting-buckets-to-wordpress.html

Thank you