Will my Wordpress installation persist across an EC2 retirement?

Question

I have a site running Wordpress on an EC2 instance. It is now down and AWS is telling me the instance will be retired in a couple weeks. The instance retirement docs say that I need to create an AMI from my instance and restore from that AMI to another instance. This process has failed me so far on three attempts (with the three AMI creation attempts still pending after 24 hours).

While backup via AMI creation is recommended in this situation, is it necessary? If I just stop/start my instance, will my whole Wordpress installation (including posts, content, and other stuff store in MySQL) come right back up once it's started on a healthy host?

Answer 1

Yes. Stopping the instance and Starting it again will work fine.

Any data stored on an EBS volume will be preserved. Data on an Instance Store device will be lost. (It is unlikely you would be using instance store, but worth checking.)

When started, the instance will be provisioned on a different host.