"AWS error" could be any of hundreds of services, so start with two questions: is AWS itself having a problem (check the AWS Health Dashboard), and which service is your error coming from? For a single site going down, the usual causes are on your side of AWS: a security group or firewall rule blocking traffic, an IAM permission missing (AccessDenied), a stopped or out-of-resources server, or a service limit reached.
What's the problem
Your site or app on AWS is down or erroring, or an AWS service returns an error such as AccessDenied, a timeout, or a throttling error.
Why it happens
- An AWS service incident in your region.
- Security group rules don't allow the traffic (web ports 80 and 443, or SSH for you).
- IAM permissions: the role or user lacks permission for the action, often after a policy change.
- The server (EC2 instance) stopped, ran out of memory or disk, or failed status checks.
- Service limits or throttling: too many requests to an AWS API.
- A load balancer marking all servers unhealthy.
How to fix it
- Check the AWS Health Dashboard for your region and services.
- Read the full error: the service name and error code say which part failed.
- For connection timeouts, check the instance is running and its security group allows the port.
- For
AccessDenied, check the IAM policy for the role or user making the call. - For a load balancer error, check its target health and the health check path.
- Check CloudWatch metrics and logs for the time of the failure.
What Preventionlabs checks
One click runs the full report on your domain. For this problem it shows whether your site loads, how fast, and where its redirects go; uptime checked every 5 minutes, with an email when the site goes down and when it is back; up to 50 pages from your sitemap, listing any that fail or are slow, plus broken links on them; your DNS: nameservers, addresses, DNSSEC, and records pointing at services that no longer exist; your domain's registration and expiry date. It has no connection to your host, so check the host's status page and logs as well.
Run your free reportYour first report is free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains. Read-only: it never changes anything.
Sources
- Amazon Web Services: AWS Health Dashboardofficial docs
You can use the AWS Health Dashboard – Service health to view the health of all AWS services.
- Amazon Web Services: Troubleshoot issues connecting to your Amazon EC2 Linux instanceofficial docs
The default security group for the VPC does not allow incoming SSH traffic by default.
Preventionlabs is independent and not affiliated with Amazon Web Services. Product names are used only to describe the problem.
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