This is part of the series which started with Accessing Cardbox without Windows.
Your computer in the cloud isn’t costing you much. Its disk space costs you $3 per month, and actually running it costs $0.02 per hour on top of that. So leaving it running the whole time will cost you only $18 per month.
Nevertheless, this may be a lot to pay if you only ever use this facility when you are on holiday. There are two ways of cutting costs.
Stop and Start
In the Amazon EC2 Console, pick “Instances” from the list in the left-hand margin. You can stop your computer by right-clicking on it and picking “Stop” from the menu. This is the equivalent of telling a physical computer to sleep. All connections will be broken, but all data will be preserved.
A computer in the stopped state costs you $3 per month for its disk space, and that is all.
When you want to restart your computer, go to the console, right-click on the computer, and pick “Start” from the menu. Allow two or three minutes for the computer to restart.
Warning: Every time you stop and start, the IP address changes. To find out the new IP address, right-click on the computer and pick “Connect” from the menu.
Destroying your computer
You may decide that you don’t want your cloud computer any more. Or you may not want to waste $3 per month on disk space when you only use the computer for one month in the year.
To destroy your computer completely (and all the data on it), right-click on it and pick “Terminate” from the menu. Read and acknowledge Amazon’s warning messages.
All the data on your cloud computer will be lost when you terminate it. If you have only been using your cloud computer to access databases on a Cardbox Server (as we recommend), this will only mean that your workspace will disappear. But before terminating the computer, be very sure that you never created any databases on that computer, because once it is terminated they will be lost.