EC2 Host Issue

I was out getting some dinner tonight when I got an email from a monitoring service that my blog (the one you're reading right now!) was down. !Ok... maybe something on the kernel has gone insane. I can quickly log onto the AWS console from my phone to reboot it.I did that from the 74th Street Ale House and noticed that the server wasn't coming up. Not good.I get home and I can't SSH into the instance either.At this point I'm getting a bit annoyed.From knowing what I know about EC2 and how things run I'm guessing the underlying host that was running my instance decided to have problems.Thankfully the actual data that runs my blog isn't stored on the host -- it's all on a set of EBS volumes which is independent.From here a simple stop and restart took care of the problem. Stopping a host frees up whatever it's running on. Starting it back up will get it to launch on any other healthy machine.Which it did.  :-)