Transitioning from Amazon AWS to a different Hosting provider

Question

This task fell on my lap and I have no experience with Amazon aws. We run a simple informational site along with redmine (as a subdomain) using amazon aws and want to switch to simple helix. I have researched how to switch providers and I haven't found any posts that show how to do this step by step. Is there a simple way to move from Amazon aws to another provider? I think it would be best to create a duplicate of what we have on amazon aws on the simple helix server before totally dropping amazon aws. As far as I know I only have log in details to EC2 Console, no ssh log in details or FTP for amazon aws.

Answer 1

When an AWS instance is launched a public/private key pair is specified and installed in the running instance. You can find the name of the key-pair by looking at details of the instance in the console. Check for "Key pair name".

Hopefully, you'll have the private key of that pair somewhere at hand. If it's lost I'm not sure how to recover it without tech support from Amazon.

If you have the private key then ssh is simple, just type:

ssh -i my.private.key -l ubuntu servername

or something similar and you're in.

FTP access might require opening up a port in the firewall. Look at the security group settings for the server to see what ports are open. Secure ftp is available if you can ssh into the machine using the same private key.