Self-Hosting WordPress on AWS: Three Architectures Compared
We've helped clients run WordPress on AWS in three distinct architectures: Lightsail for simplicity, our marketplace pattern for production workloads, and fully custom designs for the largest sites. Here's an honest comparison of where each fits.
We’ve helped clients run WordPress on AWS in three distinct shapes. None of them is the right answer for every team; they fit different traffic profiles, budgets, and operational appetites.
This post is an honest comparison of where each architecture fits, drawing on a few years of running our WordPress AWS Marketplace pattern and supporting clients with sites at all scales.
Architecture 1: Lightsail
The simplest. Amazon Lightsail offers WordPress as a one-click deployment. You pick an instance size, hit go, and you have a working WordPress site in five minutes.
Where it fits. Personal sites, small business sites, blogs with low to moderate traffic. Anywhere “good enough” beats “best in class.”
What you get. A single VPS with WordPress pre-installed. Bundled bandwidth. Snapshot backups. A predictable monthly bill in the $10 to $40 range.
What you don’t get. High availability. Horizontal scaling. Production-grade database isolation. Anything resembling infrastructure as code.
Honest take. For sites where the worst-case impact of an outage is “the owner is annoyed for an hour,” Lightsail is excellent. The cost-to-value ratio at the bottom of the WordPress market is hard to beat.
Architecture 2: Our Marketplace Pattern
The middle ground. Our WordPress AWS Marketplace pattern deploys a production-grade WordPress environment in your AWS account using CloudFormation: ASG-backed EC2 instances, RDS Aurora, EFS for shared media, ALB, CloudFront, automated backups.
We released a significant update to this pattern in 2024 that simplified the developer experience considerably.
Where it fits. Production WordPress sites with real traffic, real uptime requirements, and a team that wants AWS-native infrastructure without building it from scratch.
What you get. Multi-AZ resilience. Auto-scaling. Managed database. Standard AWS observability. CloudFormation as the source of truth, meaning the architecture is maintainable and modifiable by anyone with CloudFormation experience.
What you don’t get. Highly customized infrastructure for your specific workload shape. The pattern is opinionated; if your needs are unusual, you’ll fight the pattern.
Honest take. For most production WordPress workloads (which are more common than people admit) this is the right starting point. The deploy time is comparable to Lightsail; the operational shape is comparable to a hand-rolled architecture.
Architecture 3: Fully Custom
The high end. For the largest WordPress sites we work with, the architecture diverges enough from any out-of-the-box pattern that custom infrastructure is the right call.
Where it fits. Sites with millions of monthly visitors, complex caching requirements, multi-region serving, custom CDN configurations, or unusual integrations (headless setups, custom build pipelines, complex media handling).
What you get. Whatever you build. Typically: ECS or EKS for application tier, Aurora for database, ElastiCache for object cache, CloudFront with custom behaviors, dedicated build pipelines for plugins and themes, observability stack tuned to your application.
What you don’t get. A turnkey deployment. Custom WordPress on AWS is real engineering work, typically a multi-month build with ongoing operational investment.
Honest take. This is rarely the right starting point. Most teams who think they need a custom architecture would be better served by starting with our pattern and outgrowing it before investing in custom work. The exceptions (global news sites, e-commerce at scale, headless setups with custom front-ends) know they’re exceptions.
Choosing between them
A simple decision tree:
- Is uptime an SLA you’ll be measured against? If no, Lightsail.
- Is your traffic shape unusual or are you doing something genuinely complex? If no, our pattern.
- Otherwise: custom, but seriously consider whether you’re past the point where the pattern would suffice.
Most teams who think they’re at step 3 are actually at step 2.
A word on cost
Rough cost order of magnitude per month (numbers vary heavily by traffic):
- Lightsail: $20 to $60
- Marketplace pattern: $200 to $600
- Custom: $1,000+
The cost gap between Lightsail and the pattern is meaningful but bounded. The cost gap between the pattern and custom is open-ended and depends entirely on what you build.
Closing
WordPress on AWS doesn’t have one right answer. The right answer is the one that fits your actual operational requirements without paying for capabilities you don’t need.
If you’d like help figuring out which architecture fits your situation, or if you want to explore our WordPress pattern, we’re happy to talk it through.