Jeremy Davis's picture

In my post above I mistakenly wrote "Buget plan" instead of "Hobby plan" but I just fixed it. Bottom line is that if you have a S3 backed instance and you stop it, yes you will lose all your data. If you have a EBS backed instance then your data will not all disapear but personally I don't 100% trust it and prefer to make sure you have a backup (my preference is TKLBAM). But make sure you test your TKLBAM backups occasionally. It's pretty good IMO but it pays to be on the safe side IMO.

As for your domain name, I'm not very experienced with AWS and custom domain names (the servers I run on AWS are all using the free tklapp.com domain names), but it sounds to me like you are on the right track. Whilst it's not quite a static IP, the elastic IP is basically a static IP that you can contact your machine on, so for all intents and purposes it is a static IP and AFAIK is the best and most reliable way to link up to your own custom domain. The Hub can do it via dynamic DNS, but I'm not sure if there is a charge for using a custom domain and some DNS servers can be slow to propagate an IP change. You also have to llow for DNS caching, so the best and most reliable way IMO is with an elastic IP.

And glad that my comments are useful to you. I was a complete Linux newb myself a few years ago so don't give up hope! :) IMO playing with stuff (and breaking it) is the best way to learn. Don;t do it with your production server though! :)