Context
I use a combination of @AWS Lightsail and @Wordpress for hosting all of my blogs and websites. Recently I migrated from using a simple single WordPress instance to a WordPress Multi-Site Instance (I’ll outline that change elsewhere).
But as part of finishing that migration, I needed to shut down the older AWS Lightsail instance. To figure out how to do this, I found a few different resources. I found a Medium post from April 2024, a Reddit post talking about when you’re charged for Lightsail and an AWS re:Post post talking about this process here.
Note: I’m making this change as I already have migrated the contents of the “Single Instance WordPress Site” to my new WordPress Multi-Site. If I had not done that – I would not be making this change (as you would lose all of your data).
Action
- Firstly, I’m going to delete all of my snapshots that I have for the Instance.
- Then I’m going to detach my static IP under the
Networkingtab of my Instance’s Console. At this point, I’ve already removed any references to this IP from my DNS records. - After that I’m going to the
Networktab of the AWS Lightsail Console and delete theStatic IPI just detached from my instance. - Now I’m going to stop running my instance before deleting it entirely. I’ll click
Stop, and then wait for it to stop before clickingDeleteand typing Confirm.
Note: There are more steps outlined in the AWS repost post – however I found that none of these extra steps were things that I had done or configured on my instance so after these steps above I was done.
Result
I now have one less instance to manage in AWS Lightsail and you can too! It’s always good to make sure that you save money where you can – I didn’t need this instance running anymore after confirming that I’d got everything working on the multi-site setup.
Have a great day!