AWS Lightsail vs Google Cloud

AWS Lightsail is strongest for AWS ecosystem users. Google Cloud is strongest for enterprises. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	AWS Lightsail	Google Cloud
Starting price	$0.8/mo	$0.01/mo
Best for	AWS ecosystem users Predictable bundled pricing Windows workloads	Enterprises Data & AI/ML workloads Kubernetes-native teams BigQuery/analytics-heavy stacks
Stated uptime SLA	99.9%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	16	40
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	AWS Support plans (separate from Lightsail), Community forums, Docs	Ticket, Docs, Community, Phone (paid support tiers)
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA eligible	SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA (BAA available), GDPR, FedRAMP (select services)
Hidden costs to watch for	Data transfer overage varies significantly by AWS region ($0.09-$0.132/GB) Windows bundles cost 70-90% more than equivalent Linux bundles	Network egress to internet billed per-GB and rises past free tier (200 GiB/month egress to certain destinations) Sustained-use and committed-use discounts are separate mechanisms and easy to miss when comparing to flat-rate competitors Custom machine types carry a 5% premium over predefined machine type pricing GKE charges a $0.10/hour cluster management fee per cluster (Standard and Autopilot alike) Cloud SQL high-availability configuration doubles vCPU, memory, and persistent disk costs Nearline/Coldline/Archive storage classes carry early-deletion minimum storage durations (30/90/365 days) and per-GB retrieval fees
Last reviewed	2026-07-17	2026-07-18