Switching to a resized lightsail instance

[Sid88]

I'm currently running WHM & Cpanel on the smallest lightsail instance that is attached to a static ip. Today I took a snapshot of the instance and started a bigger lightsail instance from it. I reattached the ip to the new bigger instance, but my website does not work when attached to the new instance and shows me the standard cpanel error page saying the server might have changed and asking to contact the admin.

One of the reason I used lightsail was because I believed I could instantly switch to a bigger instance when I hit traffic. Why is this hard to do? What am I missing?

Thank you..

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! Did the IP address change when you made the switch? If so, you'd need to wait for DNS propagation to complete in order for things to work well, but the most common reason people get the "Sorry" page is because the domain is routed to one IP address but Apache is listening for the site on another.

 

[Sid88]

Since I'm using a static ip, the ip change was instant to the newer more powerful instance. But I hit the sorry page. I remapped the ip to the original instance and my site began instantly working again. Last week my site hit a lot of traffic that bought my server to its knees. I was tempted to start a new instance from the snapshot (for which purpose I got a static ip in the first place). But I developed cold feet because I hadn't tested it before.

And the test I did the following day failed. Is there anything I can do to make the shift to the new instance, instant? Without which my setup does not feel very scalable and does not give me the benefit of being on lightsail.

 

[cPRex]

if the remap process had to be done on the Amazon side of things, there isn't more you can do in cPanel to make it faster as that would be up to them and how they perform the resize.

 

[NetworkChaos]

This issue is a common issue that cPanel has still not fixed yet.

You can find the solution to your problem here:

How to change the private IP of a server

What is the proper way to update a server once the public and private IP have been changed? This is a common scenario when restoring a snapshot (or upgrading an instance) on AWS Lightsail. The snapshot restores to a new instance where a new public IP AND private IP are given to the system. A...

forums.cpanel.net

Essentially your internal IP has changed between the old instance and new instance and your public IP is still pointing to the old private IP. Also check the resolver configuration, sometimes the cPanel software will reset that to something invalid after snapshot restore.

It's very annoying that cPanel cannot create a simple script to address this issue even after years of it being known, but when it comes to creating a new pricing structure to make more money they're all over it. We pay these fees to use software that's supposed to simplify and speed up server administration so get on top of this problen and the countless other problems that have not been addressed and give your users the solutions they need.

 

[Sid88]

I expected I did something wrong, but if the issue is with cpanel than what hyperscale are we talking about here? I cancelled my subscription after this. Might as well pay that $15 to increase my instance size because I'm just running a single website.

 

[cPRex]

It's important to note that we don't officially support changing the NAT IP address after a server is created. We have this outlined in our documentation here:

"We strongly recommend that you only perform these actions on a new installation of cPanel & WHM. Do not attempt a 1:1 NAT configuration on an existing production server."

1:1 NAT | cPanel & WHM Documentation

When you install cPanel & WHM, the installer will detect whether your server resides on a NAT-configured network.

docs.cpanel.net

The details provided earlier are a workaround we use to try and adjust this when the NAT configuration changes.

 

[Durkan Group]

@Sid88, did you ever find a resolution here? Having same issue with creating new instances from a snapshot on lightsail. Even when a fresh cpanel instance is created, cpanel has finished installing and a manual snapshot is taken. That new instance from the snapshot is completely unresponsive to both SSH and browser access through port 2087.

 

[Durkan Group]

This issue has been resolved for myself. An OS update to the package cloud-init solved the networking issue. The issue was system_info['variant'] value was not matching up to KNOWN_DISTROS in cloud-init.
Hurray!