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Table of Contents
Move EC2 Instance
Jun 2017
Introduction
There are a couple of reasons you might want to move your EC2 Instance. The first is that you want to host your EC2 Instance in a location closest to your users. The second is that (like me) you setup your first EC2 instance, got it all running, then realised that your server is several thousand miles away, so now you want it hosted in your region.
There are probably more reasons that that, but these are the main two that spring to mind. This tutorial shows you how to move your EC2 instance (or indeed just create a local copy that will be useful for redundancy purposes) to another zone.
Please bear in mind, if you are using the Free Tier system, that you will need enough available space (you get 30GB free) and that you will be running two instances, albeit for a short time, so this could potentially cost you a few pennies, if we we are talking about less than an hour it might not incur any charges.
Move EC2 Instance
Login to the AWS Console and navigate to your EC2 Instance.
In the example above it can be see that my EC2 Instance is in the Availability Zone (AZ) us-east-2c. I am in England, so I really need a closer AZ to where I am.