How frequently should I expect "Scheduled Maintenance for Amazon Lightsail instances"

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I'm using Lightsail to host a WordPress site as well as a separate LAMP stack application. 6 weeks ago, we had "Scheduled Maintenance" from AWS that took down the site for a couple of hours in the middle of the day our time (US-East). I **hoped ** that it was a one-time or rare occurance for AWS to shutdown my instance in the middle of the day, but I just received another email:

Dear Amazon Lightsail Customer,

One or more of your Amazon Lightsail instances is scheduled for maintenance in a 2 hour window starting on Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:00:00 GMT. Maintenance activity will result in the following Lightsail instance(s) in the us-east-2 region to be unavailable and then rebooted: [My Instances Here]

Is it normal for AWS to take down instance in the middle of the day every 6 weeks? We're very lean and don't have the resources to have multiple Region / AZ hosting with the fancy back ups / log shipping stuff. Do you have any suggestions for how to mitigate this so our users don't get interupted from their work?

Thank you!

asked 10 months ago295 views
1 Answer
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Accepted Answer

Hello. Thank you for contacting AWS!

I am writing to express my sincerest apologies for the unexpected maintenance activity that caused your Lightsail instance to go down, resulting in the temporary disruption of your website hosted on AWS. I understand how frustrating and inconvenient this situation must have been for you, and I deeply regret any negative impact it had on your business operations.

This maintenance activity occurs when your lightsail instance is lying on an unhealthy hardware/host and AWS needs to perform a maintenance activity to move the lightsail to a new, healthy host by stopping and starting the instance.

Before the deadline, you can manually stop and start the instance to migrate it to a new, healthy host. After the instance has been moved to healthy host, AWS won't do anything to the instances.

Note: A stop and start isn't equivalent to a reboot. A start is required to migrate the instance to healthy hardware.

Warning: Before stopping and starting your instance, be aware that the public IP address of the instance changes on every instance stop and start. If you want a public IP that doesn't change on every stop and start of the instance, then you can attach a static IP address.

Abhinav
answered 10 months ago
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EXPERT
reviewed 10 months ago
  • Thank you for your response! Being able to stop and start on my own time is MUCH better since I'll be able to do so in the middle of the night when we have very few customers.

    I wish it was more clear in the emails that I got that I was able to do this, I would have done that for the previous disruption as well.

    Thank you for your information!

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