my EC2 instance seems down and it won't reboot from the console

Question

I have an EC2 instance running on Ubuntu 14.04 that's been up for about 3 months. I got its IP address whitelisted from my payment processing partner so it's kind of a hard decision to reboot it since its IP address is going to change. But here's what has happened now : I was working on it via ssh, launching a node.js process and watching the logs as I was using a mobile app communicating with it, then all of a sudden it stopped responding to keyboard input. Now I can't visit any website hosted on it and I can't ssh in :

ssh: connect to host ***.***.***.*** port 22: Can't assign requested address

And I can't even reboot the instance from the console : I click reboot, I get the alert dialog I click "Yes I am sure", nothing happens, the instance is still running after refreshing the page and with the same IP address.

What should I do ?

Answer 1

Sometimes EC2s crash and can take hours to respond to a reboot from the console. In rare cases Amazon has to be involved to kill it. Best thing to do is take a snapshot of your attached storage and create a new EC2 instance.

With regards to your IP you should be using an Elastic IP. You get one free one per EC2 and it's yours to keep till you release it. If you have one you can recreate an EC2 from snapshots and then attach your Elastic IP and be up and running in minutes.

EDIT

As an example my EC2 crashed around 2 months ago with your same problem. I recreated everything from snapshots and moved my Elastic IP. After about 4-6 hours the EC2 finally stopped and I could start it again but I have read in forums that occasionally AWS needs to get involved.