I'm using the AWS Free Tier, which gives me one free EC2 microinstance and one free Elastic Load Balancer, if I understand things correctly.
I understand that usually ELBs are used when you are using multiple EC2 instances. I don't really want to run multiple instances if I can help it, and 90% of the time my single EC2 instance seems to handle the traffic that is thrown at it, but occasionally it gets unresponsive and needs to be rebooted. It doesn't seem to do this automatically.
I read the ELBs will restart microinstances that it dubs "unhealthy" (unresponsive to multiple ping attempts). So one idea I had was to create a single ELB, assign my single EC2 to it, and therein create an easy "auto-reboot if it gets stuck" situation.
I've set it up, and it didn't balk or bark at me, but I was wondering if I'm understanding this right. I'm fairly new to server administration and only just getting into concepts like micro-instances and ELBs and whatever, though (like all fools) I think I understand the basics of it.
Is this a good idea? Is there an easier way to accomplish this? I've tried to Google and search for other people doing this same thing and not found anyone, but I can't tell if that's because it won't work or because nobody else is foolish enough to try and use a single EC2 micro instance for all of their traffic. I am deeply suspicious that it is a bad idea since I don't see anyone else talking about it, and while I am fairly clever about some things, I'm not too confident about being clever in these sorts of matters!
Thanks for your help!