AWS LightSail – Upgrade Instance In Under 10 Minutes
If you have a website created using AWS LightSail – there’s good news! It’s possible to upgrade your LightSail instance in less than 10 minutes by following these step-by-step instructions (whether or not we’re using WordPress). I held off for a while myself thinking that it was going to be a much harder process. In fact, I was able to upgrade my LightSail WordPress instance in about 10 minutes or less. Although it can be done this quickly, take your time since we don’t want to make any mistakes.
Disclaimer: Proceed at your own risk. While I am confident in the provided steps, products change and mistakes can happen.
First – Take A Snapshot
This is arguably the longest step and mostly because you have to wait for AWS LightSail to create the snapshot copy of your LightSail instance. To do this, under your instance, select the Snapshots tab and then select “Create snapshot”.
Give your new snapshot a name and then click on the “Create” button.
Now we wait a few minutes for the snapshot to be created.
Second – Create A New Instance
Once the snapshot is created we can create our new instance. Select the ellipse on the right side of the new snapshot and then select “Create new instance”.
Scroll through the options and upgrade to the instance desired.
Give the instance a name and then click on the “Create Instance” button at the bottom of the page. Once we scroll over to the Instances tab we will see our instance being created and in a state of “Pending”. Wait for this to complete.
Depending on what we need the new or old instance for will depend on if we decide to delete or stop running our old instance. In this case I’m going to stop running the old instance since I want the new one to be my production replacement.
Third – Swap Public IP
In order for this to work we must have a public IP assigned to our original instance. As a result of this we can remove the IP from the old instance and add it to our brand new one. We can go to our original instance under the Networking tab to detach.
Note: We want to detach and re-attach the Public IP as quick as possible as to not disrupt any flow of website traffic.
Once the IP is detached we can go to the Networking tab of our new instance and attach the Public IP.
A list of our Public IP addresses will appear and we want to replace it with our detached IP.
That’s It! – Final Thoughts
Our upgrade for our LightSail instance is complete! Make sure to test out the website and to stop the old running instance if it’s still running. The old instance will still cost money through LightSail unless it’s completely deleted. As a result, we may want to keep it just for a little while for peace of mind.
Stopping the old instance will ensure that you are able to still access your website from the new instance. This is a good test to validate we’ve completed our process successfully.
Again, just make sure to take each step slowly and understand it before executing. Taking our time should only add a few extra minutes for some real peace of mind. Upgrading the LightSail instance in my case improved my overall website performance slightly and should be able to scale better in the future.