Amazon, yes, the online reseller, runs a Cloud Hosting business under the name of AWS for professional businesses and large enterprises but has also a starter offering under the name of Amazon or AWS Lightsail. Lightsail is an entry level offering (https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/) and it is a good starting point to run your own virtual private server  in the cloud. 

The entry offer starts at US$ 5.00 (or US$ 3.50 in case you would not need an IPv4 address for your server), plus local tax / VAT and provides*:

• Linux based server
• 2 vCPUs
• 0.5 GB Memory
• 20 GB Disk Space
• 1 TB data transfer

* last checked in July 2024.

But that is really only the starting offering, you can go much bigger if you want, too. And it is even free in the first month, so no high hurdles to try out this offering. 

There other sizes and configurations available, too. See the example screenshot from July 2024:

For the server location you can select between several data centre locations in Europe, US, and Asia Pacific region.

Multiple Instances

Lightsail is not limited to a single instance and you can easily install and run multiple instances at a time. Even the offering for a free month trial is not based on a single instance, but rather on a time limited and the billing is pro-rata. The offer covers 750 hours per month (31 days x 24 hours = 744 hours). It's very easy to create new instances for testing purposes and deleted old once when you do not need them anymore.

DNS and Nameserver

You get a public static IP address for your instance. But Amazon Lightsail does also provide nameservers to manage the domain's DNS records within Lightsail. If you have already registered a domain name with a domain name provider you create a domain name zone within Lightsail and link it to your static IP address. Then you need to take Amazon Lightsail's name servers and update the name server entries with your domain name provider.

Because of a limit of a maximum of three DNS zones in Lightsail in the past, I decided to manage my DNS records with my domain name provider. For this I just had to update my DNS records with my static IP address I had received from Amazon Lightsail and the nameservers with the one's from my domain name provider.

Amazon does also provide a service to register domain names with them, they call it "Amazon Route 53". But I have not looked into that and did not try it out.

Sign up with Amazon Lightsail

It is very easy and straightforward to create the AWS Lightsail account by just providing credit card data, and ready it was. The user interface is easy to understand and it makes it easy to select the services needed.

After you have signed up with Amazon Lightsail you can create your Virtual Private Server(s) as instances using the Amazon Lightsail console.