Introduction

I recently rebuilt two Lightsail instances (dev and production) and had my first real encounter with Static IPs. They look like EC2's Elastic IPs, but the billing and behavior differ in subtle ways. Everything I learned boils down to five rules — and one framing that makes all five obvious: a static IP is not a property of the server; it's an asset of your account.

The mistake that started it — copying yesterday's choice

When creating the production instance, I traced the exact steps from the dev instance I'd built the day before — and ended up on the $7 plan, even though we had decided production would be $5. Copying yesterday's choice was the mistake.

Normally this would hurt: recreating an instance means a new public IP, which means re-registering the allowed source IP with our payment gateway. But because a static IP was attached, recovery took 10 minutes: delete → recreate on $5 → re-attach the same static IP. That incident became a live test of all five rules.

The five rules

1.…