stop temporarily Amazon instance?

Question

This is not my area so its probably basic. We have some instance in Amazon EC2, on development. The only thing it do, is to run some php script . We pay a lot, although we only use it once in a while to check things .

I would like to stop it ,and resume when ever i need it for an hour of tests. I could see you can put it in stop mode , and they say it will erase all the data.

They also say it will remove any previous DNS and create new when resume

That means they dont really gives you any option for development, because you cant change the whole system every time, with a different DNS, and recopy your data.

Is that means we have to copy our script to the server every time we want to resume and update to a new DNS?Is there any other things affected by the stop ?
Is there any simpler way to stop charging and resuming every once in a while ? thanks.

Answer 1

No data is erased when you stop an instance, only when you terminate it (if you choose to).

You can have an elastic IP and pay when you don't use it (as Michael said) or maybe install a DNS updater like ddclient

Answer 2

According to your question, Yes you can stop the instance and the data will still remain if the instance is EBS-backed. An Amazon EBS-backed instance can be stopped and later restarted without affecting data stored in the attached volumes. According to my knowledge, By Default Amazon provides EBS-backed root volume so no worries for the data.

You can use Elastic IP Address instead of DNS names. An Elastic IP address is a static IP address designed for dynamic cloud computing.Your Elastic IP address is associated with your AWS account, not a particular instance, and it remains associated with your account until you choose to release it explicitly.

So if you use Elastic IP Address instead of DNS names in your php script your problem will be solved.

Hope it helps:-)

Reference: AWS Elastic IP Address

AWS Root Device Storage Concepts