AWS Lightsail vs IONOS

AWS Lightsail is strongest for AWS ecosystem users. IONOS is strongest for budget shared/VPS hosting. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	AWS Lightsail	IONOS
Starting price	$0.8/mo	$0.02/mo
Best for	AWS ecosystem users Predictable bundled pricing Windows workloads	Budget shared/VPS hosting Windows workloads EU-based data residency Granular building-block cloud pricing
Stated uptime SLA	99.9%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	NVME
Regions	16	6
Managed Kubernetes	No	Yes
Support channels	AWS Support plans (separate from Lightsail), Community forums, Docs	24/7 Phone, Ticket, Docs, Live Chat
Compliance	SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA eligible	GDPR, ISO 27001
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	Intro pricing on VPS+ and Web Hosting plans (e.g. $2/mo, $1/mo) is a 3-month or 1-year promotional rate on a 1-year contract; renewal pricing after the promo/contract period is 2-6x higher Additional static IPv4 addresses billed at $6.00 per 30 days each Outbound data transfer beyond the free 2TB pooled allowance is tiered: $0.036/GB (2-10TB), dropping to $0.018/GB beyond 150TB Windows Server and RedHat Enterprise Linux require separate per-vCPU/core license surcharges on top of Compute Engine/Cube pricing IONOS CLOUD Compute Engine building-block pricing (Cores + RAM + Storage priced independently) can be harder to estimate than fixed-tier competitors without using their price calculator
Last reviewed	2026-07-17	2026-07-18