Security – AWS EC2 SSH from the IP address which has changed

I presume at Dreamhost you'll have a DNS management panel where you update your DNS settings. Update the the A record for your chosen domain to the IP elastic IP that you've put on your instance at AWS.

If you're running a variety of services on that host then you may also want to set-up some CNAME records for each service to map them across to the same host e.g. ftp, www etc.

After reading the VPC documentation more closely, my first EC2 instance is connected.

Here is what i got wrong when setting up the EC2 instance and VPC.

With only a private ip, my development machine would never be able to connect to the EC2 instance unless it was a part of the VPC's network. So to talk to it from the outside, I needed to specify that for every instance created that an associated public ip address be assigned as well.

Here is what did to fix it:

1. Correct me if i am wrong, but it looks like there was not an option in the EC2 browser console to assign a public ip address to the already created instance, So i ended up deleting it.

2. I want back to the VPC console, and went to the subnets option. I then selected the public subnet that was initially created in the VPC wizard and specified in the "Modify Auto-Assign Public IP" option to enable the auto-assignment of a public ip address for every new EC2 instance created.

3. Create a new EC2 instance, and a new public ip address is assigned.

4. Followed amazon's directions for ssh and communication was successfully initiated.