AWS Documentation » Amazon EC2 » User Guide » Amazon EC2 Instances » Stopping Instances » Stopping and Starting Instances	« Previous Next »
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Stopping and Starting Instances

You can stop and restart Amazon EC2 instances that use Amazon EBS volumes as their root devices.

Note

If you try to stop an instance that uses an instance store as its root device, you receive an error.

When an instance is stopped, it is shut down, and any data stored in RAM is not preserved. You're not billed for hourly usage or data transfer, but you're billed for any Amazon EBS volume storage. You can start the instance at any time with a start request. Each time you transition an instance from stopped to started, we charge a full instance hour, even if transitions happen multiple times within a single hour.

For information about the differences between stopping an instance and terminating an instance, see Stopping Instances.

AWS Management Console

To stop and start an instance

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
Click Instances in the Navigation pane.
The console displays a list of running instances.
Select an instance, select Instance Actions, and click Stop Instance.
A confirmation dialog box appears.
Click the Yes, Stop Instance.
The instance is stopped and saved as a snapshot.
To restart the stopped instance, select Stopped Instances from the Viewing list box.
The newly stopped instance appears in the list.
Select the instance, select Instance Actions, and click Start Instance.
The instance begins restarting.

Command Line Tools

To stop and start an instance

Use the ec2-stop-instances command to stop an instance.
```
PROMPT>  ec2-stop-instances i-10a64379
```
Amazon EC2 returns output similar to the following example.
```
IMAGE i-10a64379 running stopping 
```
Use the ec2-start-instances command to restart the instance.
```
PROMPT>  ec2-start-instances i-10a64379
```
Amazon EC2 returns output similar to the following example.
```
IMAGE i-10a64379 stopped pending 
```

API

To stop and start an instance

Construct the following Query request to stop an instance.

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=StopInstances
&InstanceId.1=i-10a64379
&AUTHPARAMS

The following is an example response.

<StopInstancesResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2013-02-01/">
  <requestId>59dbff89-35bd-4eac-99ed-be587EXAMPLE</requestId> 
  <instancesSet>
     <item>
        <instanceId>exampleinstanceid</instanceId>
        <currentState>
           <code>64</code>
           <name>stopping</name>
        </currentState>
        <previousState>
           <code>16</code>
           <name>running</name>
        </previousState>
  </instancesSet>
</StopInstancesResponse>

Construct the following Query request to restart the instance.

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=StartInstances
&InstanceId.1=i-10a64379
&AUTHPARAMS

The following is an example response.

<StartInstancesResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2013-02-01/">
   <requestId>59dbff89-35bd-4eac-99ed-be587EXAMPLE</requestId>   
   <instancesSet>
      <item>
         <instanceId>i-10a64379</instanceId>
         <currentState>
            <code>0</code>
            <name>pending</name>
         </currentState>
         <previousState>
            <code>80</code>
            <name>stopped</name>
         </previousState>
      </item>
   </instancesSet>
</StartInstancesResponse>

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