Can I run a production database on Amazon Lightsail or should I move to RDS?

All answers to this question.

Lightsail is great for "all-in-one" simple projects, but it lacks the granular control and high availability of RDS. If your database crashes on a Lightsail instance, you are responsible for recovery. With RDS, you get automated snapshots, point-in-time recovery, and the ability to scale your CPU/RAM with a few clicks without manual migration. For a business with "real customers," the peace of mind that comes with RDS backups alone is worth the extra $20-$30 a month. You don't want to explain to a customer why their data disappeared because a single virtual machine had a disk failure.

   Answered 2025-01-21 by Sandra Robinson

How much data are you actually storing, and how many concurrent connections do you expect? If you're still under 1GB of data, RDS might be overkill. Have you looked into the "Lightsail Managed Database" option as a middle ground?

   Answered 2025-01-23 by George King

• George, we're currently at 5GB and growing fast. I looked at the Lightsail Managed Database, but it seems limited in terms of performance metrics. I think we need the CloudWatch insights that come with RDS so we can see which queries are slowing down our site as traffic increases

     Commented 2025-01-24 by Jeffrey Nelson

Move to RDS. The Multi-AZ feature alone makes it a no-brainer for production. It ensures your database stays online even if a whole AWS data center has an outage.

   Answered 2025-01-26 by Michelle Peterson

• Michelle is right. While it costs more, you can't put a price on uptime. Scaling a Lightsail instance often requires downtime, whereas RDS can do it much more gracefully.

     Commented 2025-01-28 by Sandra Robinson