Your Own AWS Lightsail Server Running WordPress Lightning Fast, Spun Up in Minutes

Combine AWS Lightsail with SpinupWP, a modern cloud server control panel designed to help you manage WordPress sites and serve them lightning fast.

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Jump down to our short tutorial on how to set up an AWS Lightsail server with SpinupWP and run WordPress lightning fast.

AWS Lightsail is a Great Choice for SpinupWP

AWS is the original gangster of cloud computing. We run our infrastructure on AWS because it’s an incredibly powerful platform and very affordably priced. However, it has a reputation of being complicated and cumbersome to work with. That’s where Amazon Lightsail comes in. Lightsail strips away much of the complexity of AWS, making it simpler to host cloud servers on the famous AWS infrastructure.

Easy Connection

Connect your AWS Lightsail server with AWS’ other powerful services like Amazon S3 storage for your media and backups. Combine that with SpinupWP's thorough guide on how to Install WordPress on AWS Lightsail, and you can easily connect your AWS server with our ​​modern cloud-based control panel.

Powerful Servers

In our benchmarks, an AWS Lightsail server performed very well against DigitalOcean and Google Cloud servers for serving cached and uncached requests to a WordPress site. With that and SpinupWP’s full-page caching and automated daily site backups, you’ll be hosting WordPress powerfully in your workflow at scale.

Solid Network Infrastructure

Amazon Lightsail not only extracts a lot of the complexities around AWS, it also uses the same solid infrastructure that AWS is known for. Plus, you’ll also have the option to configure your server and sites specifically to your needs via the SpinupWP dashboard.

Reliable

Amazon Lightsail provides easy-to-install servers that are backed by Amazon Web Services' reliability and security. They also provide reliable access to your critical data and applications. SpinupWP builds on AWS’s reliable network with a control panel you can trust.

Developer-Friendly

In addition to effective SSD storage and DNS records, the virtual private servers offered by Amazon Lightsail make it much easier for developers to manage, as they’re built for smaller to medium-scale workloads that use simpler applications. Combine that with SpinupWP’s intuitive dashboard and you’ll have sky-high confidence when hosting WordPress yourself.

Trustworthy & Secure

Take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure and built-in protection that AWS uses to protect information on all of its own services. Plus, SpinupWP configures server firewalls, automatic server software updates, and generates a free SSL certificate that you can toggle on and off. With all of these security features, your server and sites will be locked down with a stack of AWS and SpinupWP.

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Why You Need SpinupWP with AWS Lightsail

Other cloud server control panels allow you to reboot the server, add sites, and other things you expect. SpinupWP offers typical control panel features but differs in some key areas…

A Focus on WordPress

When you add a new site to your server via SpinupWP, it will configure a free SSL certificate, cron jobs, caching rules, WP-CLI, and everything needed to run WordPress lightning fast. Our team has over a decade of experience in WordPress development, so we know WordPress better than most.

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Developer Experience

SpinupWP is designed for developers by developers. Deploy code with `git push` and in a couple of clicks switch the PHP version of a site or inspect the error logs. Or use the SpinupWP CLI to manage your server without a mouse and use the REST API and PHP SDK to automate repetitive tasks.

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Built-in Coaching and Education

Our customers love the comprehensive docs here on our site as well as the helpful hints in the sidebar of each screen of the app. SpinupWP will also create a prioritized list of things you need to do with your servers and sites to keep them performant and secure.

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Easily Manage Servers & Sites

After launching a WordPress site on a virtual server with Amazon Lightsail, the management is quite simple. You can easily manage all your sites from the SpinupWP dashboard, set up your domain name records and access your server via SSH with one click, among other things.

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Full Root Access & No Lock-In

It’s your server, SpinupWP is just here to help. You can disconnect your server from SpinupWP any time. We don’t lock you in. We use standard installs of server software, no weird custom-built packages that you can’t update. You have complete control.

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A Modern Cloud-Based App

This isn’t your dad’s server control panel. SpinupWP connects to your server via SSH and runs commands for you. No installing it on your web server like the control panel dinosaurs that are still kicking around, *cough* cPanel *cough* Plesk.

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Here's What Our Users Say 👇

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Jeseph Meyers

@jesephm

@spinupwp w/ @digitalocean or AWS lightsail, I’ll never go back.

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Dan Maby

@danmaby

It's a joy working with @spinupwp to spin up and manage @awscloud Lightsail servers.

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flo ツ

WordPress and Laravel Developer

It's so incredibly easy and fast when you want to migrate a #WordPress site to a new server with @spinupwp⚡️ Honestly, it takes about 2 minutes and only 3-4 mouse clicks, including DNS updates. ⏱️

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Staging Sites in Just a Few Clicks

Need to deploy a staging site quickly? No problem! With SpinupWP you can create a complete copy of an existing site, which includes all files, the database, and server configuration. Ready to upgrade your site to a newer version of PHP but want to ensure your site is compatible? That’s where site cloning comes in...

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Laser Focused On WordPress

There are other cloud server control panels out there, but none focus on WordPress like SpinupWP.

WordPress Multisite

Multisite Support Out of the Box

SpinupWP is designed for WordPress and this includes support for multisite. Enabling a multisite network is as straightforward as toggling a switch during the new site creation wizard and selecting either a subdomain or subdirectory configuration. No fiddling with your `wp-config.php` file, installing the network, and worrying if the Nginx server is configured correctly.

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Configuring a multisite setup in SpinupWP

Theme & Plugin Updates

A Unified Dashboard for All Your WordPress Sites

SpinupWP keeps tabs on updates required by each of your WordPress sites. A glance at the SpinupWP dashboard and you can quickly see which of your sites need some attention. Run WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates without even leaving the SpinupWP dashboard.

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Themes and plugin update indicators on the SpinupWP dashboard

Convenience

WordPress Magic Login

Login to the WordPress Admin with one click in your SpinupWP dashboard. WordPress Magic Login allows you to configure the WP Admin link to automatically log you in as a specific user. And you can use the Quick Login to login as another user as a one-off, without changing your WP Admin Link Settings.

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WordPress magic login in SpinupWP

Performance

Cache All the Things

Caching is one of the keys to a high-performing WordPress site. All sites are set up with Redis object caching to greatly reduce database requests and with the check of a box, you can also enable full-page caching to skip PHP processing entirely and serve pages lightning fast, just like a static site. Full-page caching rules for WordPress core and popular plugins like WooCommerce are preconfigured.

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Configuring page cache settings in SpinupWP

Automation

Scheduled Posts, Published on Schedule

For every site you add via SpinupWP, a server-side cron job will be configured to make sure that your WordPress site’s cron is executed every minute, as it should be. Not only will scheduled posts get published when they should, but other background tasks will work, like WooCommerce subscriptions and webhooks.

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A server-side cron job

People SpinupWP

Review a few of the recent ratings and you’ll be convinced that you’ve been missing out on SpinupWP.

Best WordPress configuration of cloud instances.

We needed to setup an AWS EC2 instance for a WordPress deployment. Using SpinupWP was quick and easy. It saved us hours of configuring Ubuntu, Nginx and caching. What we ended up with was a solid WP installation that excels at speed tests and keeps getting updates and daily backups all handled by SpinupWP.

Henrik N
Makes Server Management a Breeze.

I've been using SpinupWP practically since they launched because their platform solved my issues of spinning up AWS EC2 instances. It used to be a relatively time-consuming process, but with SpinupWP, it really makes it as simple as a few clicks after setting up the instance.

Mary-Ann Z, Designer
SpinupWP has been a game changer for me.

SpinupWP has simplified, streamlined, and revolutionized how I manage my "servers" and sites. I can't recommend it enough. I mention SpinupWP whenever anyone around me talks about WordPress hosting. SpinupWP makes it extremely easy to add, maintain, and update sites. It's beautifully designed, simple to use, quick, and bug-free.

Corey M, Owner

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Robust Caching for Lightning Fast WordPress Sites

Caching is one of the keys to a high-performing WordPress site. SpinupWP offers a robust caching solution at three levels.

Browser Caching

Reduce Asset Requests

SpinupWP configures Nginx to return far-future cache duration headers for static assets like CSS, JavaScript, fonts, images, etc., preventing them from being re-downloaded in subsequent requests. Static assets are also compressed (gzip) to reduce their file size. All of this significantly reduces the amount of data transferred and makes navigating between the pages of your site feel instant.

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Transfer

544kb

9kb

98%

Page Caching

Eliminate PHP Processing

Most pages on a WordPress site don’t change between requests. For these pages, we can save the entire page as a static HTML file and serve it for subsequent requests, eliminating all PHP and database processing. With the flip of a switch, you can turn on full page caching in SpinupWP, define custom caching rules, clear the cache, and more. No third-party plugins required, though WP Rocket is fully compatible.

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Load Time

200ms

98ms

51%

Object Caching

Cut Back on Database Queries

WordPress can be slow and database queries are by far the most common cause. With every page request, WordPress will query the database several times, often dozens of times. SpinupWP sets up an object cache on every server which saves queried data for subsequent requests. This results in a massive reduction in round trips to the database, dramatically speeding up your WordPress site.

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Database Queries

76

6

77%

* Tested on a clean install of WordPress 6 using Twenty Twenty-Two theme.

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Designed for Developers by Developers

The SpinupWP team has a background in WordPress and Laravel development and system administration with a strong appreciation for great design. We’re building the cloud server control panel that we’ve always wanted.

Push-to-Deploy

Deploy Code on Your Server via Git Push

Developers! Developers! Developers! Add a git repository to your SpinupWP site, define the branch to deploy from, and simply push to that branch to deploy your code. GitHub, Bitbucket, or a custom git repo will work. Composer is available on all SpinupWP sites by default, and it’s 100% compatible with Composer-based WordPress boilerplate projects like Bedrock. You can even configure a build script to run additional tasks on the server after a deployment is complete.

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Deploying via Git in SpinupWP

Easy Switching

Multiple Versions of PHP on a Server

SpinupWP configures PHP for each site separately, allowing you to run different versions of PHP with different settings on a server simultaneously. For example, you might run PHP 8 for new sites, but maybe you have an older site that still needs an update to work on PHP 8. No problem. Just choose PHP 7.4 from the select box when creating the site in SpinupWP. Once you update the site to run on PHP 8, you can simply edit the site in SpinupWP and select PHP 8 from the select box.

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PHP settings in SpinupWP

Code

REST API & PHP SDK

With our REST API and PHP SDK you can spin up servers and create and manage sites remotely without logging into the SpinupWP dashboard. This allows you to script repeatable tasks and automate your processes. If you host client sites, you can even build a custom dashboard for yourself and/or your clients.

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Always Up-to-Date

Latest & Greatest Software

SpinupWP will install the latest stable versions of Nginx, PHP, MySQL, and Redis from popular public apt repos. No “who-knows-what-they-did” custom builds of packages. Disconnect from SpinupWP in the future and you can still keep your packages up-to-date with `apt upgrade`.

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Log Viewer

Convenient Access to Logs

WordPress doesn’t enable error logging by default. Probably because the log is saved to a publicly accessible directory and can quickly balloon to take up a lot of hard drive space. SpinupWP enables error logs by default but stores them in a safe place and makes sure they’re rotated regularly like other server logs. Should you ever need to inspect these logs, the Site Log viewer allows you to see the last 1,000 lines from any of the server log files, as well as use the refresh feature to see new log entries in real-time.

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Viewing log files in SpinupWP

CLI4LYF

Happiest on the CLI? Stay on the CLI

If you love WP-CLI (we do! ❤️) you’ll be very pleased to find it available on the command line the first time you log in to your server. We also have a CLI package that you can install on your own machine, allowing you to list your servers, SSH into a server, and do lots more.

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Configuring page cache settings in SpinupWP

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Help at Your Fingertips

We take great pride in producing high quality documentation when and where you need it. We also offer 16x5 email support and a vibrant community forum where customers help each other when documentation isn’t enough.

Helpful hints and documentation in SpinupWP

Answers When and Where You Need Them

On the right side of just about every screen in SpinupWP you’ll find Helpful Hints in-context documentation that often answer the exact questions you have at that moment.

Shockingly Good Documentation

Underneath Helpful Hints in SpinupWP, you’ll often find Related Documentation, links to our high quality docs that live here on the site and are adored by our customers.

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Brian Richards

Event Producer @ WPSessions

Without question, @spinupwp! Everything you just described, packaged beautifully, with loads of contextual documentation! It is unbelievably, impossibly well made and equally unbelievably low priced. An absolute testament to the quality of the @spinupwp team!

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Birgit Pauli-Haack

WordPress Developer Advocate

Liking @spinupwp more and more. And they have excellent documentation!

16x5 Email Support

Our talented technical support team currently works 16 hours per day Monday through Friday. 40% of support emails receive a reply in under 2 hours and another 40% in under 12 hours. You’ll almost always get a response on the same day.

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Help Scout email from a SpinupWP customer

A Vibrant Community Forum

After signing up as a subscriber, you will receive an invite to the SpinupWP Community, where customers can interact, bounce ideas off one another, and discuss improvements they’d like to see in SpinupWP. Our customers love discussing their server setups!

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A message from a SpinupWP community member
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Josey Howarth

Director of Love Sudo

I've managed my own servers and setups and also worked with hosting companies. SpinupWP is literally the perfect solution that allows me the control I want, without the extra overhead. My sites are fast, the support is second to none, and their response to security notices helps me sleep well at night.

AWS vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr:
Which is Best for Hosting WordPress?

In this article we dive deep into each of these providers, comparing ease of use, cost, and benchmarking performance running a WordPress site.

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Security Security Security

SpinupWP’s two most important security principles are to only ever expose access to services when necessary and to keep the software of exposed services up-to-date.

Rock Solid Server Firewall

Each server is configured to disallow all connections except HTTP, HTTPS, and SSH by default. Failed SSH attempts are monitored and blocked when they reach a certain threshold. Logging into SSH via the root user is disabled.

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Automatic Server Software Updates

Keeping software up-to-date is critical to maintaining a secure server. SpinupWP configures your server to install security updates as soon as they are available, reducing the likelihood of a software vulnerability putting your server at risk.

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Airtight Isolation of Sites on a Server

Each site that you add to a server gets its own system user, which only has access to its own files. If a site on the server is compromised with malware, for example, only the files for that site can be infected.

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Keeping WordPress Up-to-date

WordPress has a reputation of being insecure because people don’t update it. A vulnerability in an outdated theme, plugin, or WordPress itself is easily exploited. Keeping WordPress up-to-date is paramount. SpinupWP helps by setting up file permissions that support WordPress auto updates, showing which sites require updates in the SpinupWP dashboard, and allowing remote updating in just a few clicks.

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Hardened Nginx Configuration

It’s your server, SpinupWP is just here to help. You can disconnect your server from SpinupWP any time. We don’t lock you in. We use standard installs of server software, no weird custom-built packages that you can’t update. You have complete control.

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Free SSL Certificates or Provide Your Own

Provide your own SSL certificate or allow SpinupWP to acquire a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for you, configure it for your site, and handle renewals. You hardly need to think about SSL certificates with SpinupWP.

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Start Your 7-Day Free Trial

Begin your SpinupWP journey today and spin up your first server within minutes.

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Your WordPress Site Backups in Your Cloud Storage Bucket

Choose from five cloud storage providers, then define your bucket, region, and retention period, and you’re all set.

Amazon S3 DigitalOcean Google Cloud Akamai/Linode Backblaze Wasabi

Backups on a Schedule

Schedule multiple backups daily, weekly and/or monthly of just the site’s database, just the site files, or a full site backup of both the database and files. You choose the schedule and retention periods.

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Backup scheduling in SpinupWP

Backup On-Demand

Need to do something a little risky with your site? Probably a good idea to run backup first. We have a button for that. It’s just one click.

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Backup on demand in SpinupWP

Download a Backup

Need to refresh a local dev environment? Instantly download a backup of your site files or your database by clicking the download icon.

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Downloading backups in SpinupWP

Restore a Backup

Browse your backups in SpinupWP to find the one you’d like to restore. Easily restore a backup in just a few clicks.

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Restoring backups in SpinupWP

Start Your 7-Day Free Trial

Begin your SpinupWP journey today and spin up your first server within minutes.

Move a Site to Another Server with Ease

Let’s say a site on one of your servers has grown. It’s using a lot of CPU and memory, and is slowing down the other sites on the server. You need to move that site to its own server.

Usually this is a time consuming, manual process, but with SpinupWP it’s just a few clicks to spin up a new server and move your site using our site move tool and guide while maintaining all your configuration and near-zero downtime. It’s also very handy when you need to upgrade your server to the latest version of Ubuntu.

Learn More About Moving Sites

The Server Coach You’ve Always Wanted

Managing a server can be intimidating. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a coach to tell you what things you should be paying attention to with your servers and sites? What if you had a coach pointing out the right suggestions at just the right times? SpinupWP does exactly that.

Viewing todo lists in SpinupWP

Identify

The Todos screen provides a detailed list of things that need to be done with your servers and sites. Each todo explains “why” this should be taken care of in addition to “what.”

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Disk Space Low Free Up Disk Space

Prioritize

When managing servers and sites, some things should be taken care of right away, while other things can wait. We prioritize and sort your todos, and as time passes, unattended todos move up the list and eventually generate a notification.

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Critical High Medium Low

Resolve

For many todos, a few clicks will have them resolved, but for others we offer comprehensive step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue with some commands on the CLI.

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abe@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt upgrade

Perfect for Developer Teams and Agencies

Whether you’re a team of developers looking for a better solution for dev and staging sites or you’re an agency looking to offer production hosting to your clients, SpinupWP offers the flexibility you’re looking for.

Client SFTP & SSH Access to a Single Site

Set a password and easily grant your client SFTP and SSH access to a single site. And because of the security isolation between sites, your client will only have access to files for that site and no other sites on the server.

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Limit Server Access by User

On the Advanced plan, you can invite members of your team to your SpinupWP account. You can give them full access to everything or limit their capabilities and even select which servers they have access to.

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Automate All The Things

Use the SpinupWP CLI to create bash scripts to automate the creation and removal of servers and sites. Or maybe use our REST API to go beyond what’s possible with bash scripts.

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Build Your Own Client Portal

Leverage our REST API and PHP SDK to build your own branded portal for clients to log into to manage their sites.

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Start Your 7-Day Free Trial

Begin your SpinupWP journey today and spin up your first server within minutes.

Testimonial avatar

Tony S

@sanjayatony

For the past 2 months been struggling to set up AWS stuff. @spinupwp comes with great products and cures all of my pain points about AWS.

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How to Install WordPress on AWS Lightsail with SpinupWP

See below for an overview or follow our step-by-step tutorial. Looking to install WordPress on AWS EC2? We have a step-by-step tutorial. for that process as well.

1

Create a New AWS Instance

Before connecting an AWS Lightsail instance to SpinupWP, you’ll need to sign up for an AWS Management Console account if you don’t already have one. Once signed into your AWS account, navigate to Services > Lightsail, which will open Lightsail in a new window. Click ‘Create instance’. When adding a new Amazon Lightsail instance, you’ll need to select a location where the server will be hosted. Then, choose ‘Linux/Unix’ as the platform with ‘Ubuntu 22.04 LTS’ as the blueprint.

Create a new AWS instance
2

Connect Your New AWS Lightsail Instance

After the new instance has been created, navigate to the ‘Networking’ tab and add a new firewall rule for HTTPS. Then, navigate to the ‘Connect’ tab and click ‘Connect using SSH’. This will open a terminal connection via your browser. After that, head back over to SpinupWP and click ‘Spin Up a New Server’ followed by ‘AWS’. Enter the server’s public IP address, SSH username (usually ‘ubuntu’), and select 'Public Key authentication'.

Connect to your new AWS Lightsail Instance
3

Confirm Your Connection

After the instance has been connected, SpinupWP will provide a command that will need to be copied into the browser terminal connection that we opened in the last step. Copy the command into the browser terminal connection, and then confirm the connection by clicking ‘Next’ in SpinupWP. Enter the server’s hostname and select the desired database server. Click ‘Provision Server’ to begin the provisioning process.

Copy command into terminal to confirm connection

Watch as Your New AWS Server is Configured to Serve WordPress Lightning Fast

Ten minutes later, your fresh new AWS-optimized WordPress server will be ready for you. Sit back while SpinupWP does the nitty gritty of installing Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL and any other software required for hosting WordPress as fast and as reliably as possible.

People SpinupWP

Testimonial avatar

Daniel J. Lewis

@theDanielJLewis

I enjoyed my time getting high-performance managed WordPress hosting from @LiquidWeb, but I need to cut costs, so I must bid farewell and move to @Vultr + @SpinupWP.

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Martin Coombes

I've tried all the other server control panels and nothing beats SpinupWP. When you're hosting sites for clients, you need to have a server panel that is reliable and fast. It's a bonus that it's super simple to use too!

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Clifton Griffin

@clifgriffin

Shout out to @spinupwp for actually understanding how devs deploy sites. The ability to validate SSL before pointing your domain is a KILLER feature.

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