Started new Lightsail instance from snapshot, get "connection refused"

Question

If I start a new Lightsail instance from a snapshot, it runs but refuses a connection. Sometimes if I stop and restart the instance, it will work. But now, nothing works! Is there something I'm doing wrong? It used to work all the time but lately I'm having trouble connecting to any new snapshot instance. Ports are ALL OPEN, no firewall. I can connect SSH but not HTTP.

Answer

Two things to check here. Both are already answered in rePost-User-5810350.

In the Lightsail console, in the networking tab ensure you have a public IP and the firewall is configured to allow routing.

Secondly you may need to restart the web server running on the instance.

You can also root cause this issue by looking into the webserver logs.

Answer

I tried restarting apache with no impact.

Try creating your new instance in a new region.  You may find this resolves the problem.  I made no other change than selecting the new region for the snapshot when I had this problem and it seemed to work for me.

I suspect I exhausted some region-based quota for my account, and moving to a new region resolved the shortfall.

Note: A perfect "tell all" is to try to create a new instance from scratch (not from a snapshot). On my account, I could spin up the instance, but I'd get the connection refused message.  So I deleted the instance, and tried on a new region and had no problem.

I suspect there are a lot of limiting quotas that go with a light sail account, and it's possible to exceed them without getting any warning.

Started new Lightsail instance from snapshot, get "connection refused"

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