My site was down for much of today as I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my image from ground up. This was something I had considered doing for some time now. The old site had been through a couple of ubuntu upgrades and was chugging along, but I always thought it would be good to do a fresh install. However I never really wanted to dump the time into it. Then I saw this article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14284/amazon-offers-another-amd-epyc-powered-instance-t3a

The Upgrade Process

I finally got around to upgrading my web server from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04.1. I decided to jot down my experiences in case anyone else runs into these issues.

Preparation

The first thing I did prior to doing the upgrade was to run updraft plus to backup the Blog’s database and files. After that finished I logged into the Amazon EC2 console and created an image of my AMI. This way in the worst case scenario that I trashed my image I could just boot the backup image and be where I was before I began.

About a month ago I got an email from Amazon that they had introduced a nano instance. This was a very timely email as I was just nearing the end of my free year of AWS (your first year they give you enough of an EC2 budget to run a t2.micro instance for free). I had been running this site on the micro instance (as why not when you aren’t paying for it), but yesterday I got a bill for my EC2 usages. It was $11.46 for the month of December.