1. When I started working on this I was not fully aware of the large array of services that AWS provides and therefore our setup may not be the best possible one. So I would be checking out Elastic beanstalk for sure and see if it is feasible to use for my next venture.
2. Just to clarify, we are not running mysql on a lightsail instance, rather we are using a managed database provided by lightsail which automatically takes backups on its own and also has the option to restore a new DB from an existing backup.
3. Thanks for the insight on EB. Will be looking into it for sure.
The thought of any of these instances going down scares me as well. but I would like to believe that I have set up enough alerts everywhere so I can take immediate action :)