Remove ELB from basic webpage set-up.

Question

Hello,
We're a small company with a basic wordpress website with low traffic however a developer who did some initial work for us seems to have set up an expensive set-up in AWS. 
Both myself and my partner are non-technical.
From the cost explorer, we are spending $30+ on an elastic load balancer despite less than 1000 visits per month on a simple webpage.

What are the steps to remove the ELB? 
Domain & wordpress all purchased through AWS. I'm worried if I just delete the ELB that visitors will not reach my website.

From searching the formum so far, most questions are regarding adding an ELB rather than removing one.

Thanks for any help.

Accepted Answer

Hi,

With  the information you have shared, I infer that you are using Route53 for DNS and have a single instance running wordpress behind the load balancer. With these assumptions:
1) In Route53, you should have a hosted zone for the domain your wordpress instance is configured for. Confirm that the A record for the FQDN is pointing to the ELB DNS name. Also check the TTL value for the A record
2) Reduce the TTL value to atleast 5 min or lower and wait for the duration matching the original TTL value to give time for DNS propogation of updated value. eg. if the original TTL was 24 hours, wait 24 hours.
3) Update the A record to point to the EC2 instance IP. You might need to set Alias to no in Route53 A record for the FQDN
4) The FQDN should resolve to EC2 instance IP in approximately the time set as TTL. You can use site like https://dnschecker.org/ to verify.
5) You can then proceed to delete the ELB, after verifying the DNS is resolving to EC2 IP and the ELB is not receiving any traffic
6) With everything working fine, you can update the TTL value to the original value

Also note that EC2 is a single point for failure so it's better that you ensure that the EC2 has an Elastic IP allocated to it and not the default ephemeral Public IP. In case the EC2 instance fails and you need to set up a new one, you can always reallocate the Elastic IP to the new instance and not worry about the DNS update

--Syd

Remove ELB from basic webpage set-up.

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