The HN effect is enough to take down even the mightiest of servers lol, avoid shared hosting if you plan to make the front page, I'm curious what the article reads like but I can't get to it...the suspense is killing me
Slightly longer version - When you stop a AWS instance, the instance is torn down completely and all local state/data (Ephemeral) on the hypervisor is lost. when you then start the instance again a new hypervisor with spare capacity is found and then booted with your chosen base disk image. Restarts do not cause your instance to torn down so you don't lose local state / data. If your instance uses network drives (EBS) then these drives keep state when your server is torn down, and are re-attached when the server is started back up again,