It was a regular day, and everything was running smoothly—customers were browsing your website, orders were coming in, and business was booming. The server was handling traffic efficiently, and everything seemed to be operating as expected.

But then, disaster struck—your website suddenly crashed. Panic set in as you scrambled to find out what had happened. Was it a DDoS attack? A misconfiguration? A sudden surge in traffic? You immediately logged into the AWS Management Console to investigate. Your EC2 instance was still running, the CPU and memory usage seemed normal, and there were no obvious signs of a system failure.

After digging deeper, you noticed a critical issue: the Amazon EBS volume attached to your instance had run out of space. Your logs were filled with alarming errors such as “No space left on device,” “Failed to write to database: Disk full,” and “Error: Could not create temp file – disk quota exceeded.” Without enough disk space, your database couldn’t write new records, your web server failed to serve pages, and critical system processes were unable to execute. Your website was completely down.

Many AWS users might assume that upgrading the EC2 instance type (e.g., from t2.medium to t2.large) would fix the issue. However, this is a common misconception—increasing the instance size does not address the actual root cause. The real problem? Your storage was full. The correct approach is to increase the size of the Amazon EBS volume attached to your instance.

If you don’t act fast, the downtime could result in lost revenue from abandoned shopping carts and failed transactions, damaged SEO rankings due to prolonged unavailability, and a negative customer experience leading to increased support tickets. The good news? You don’t have to restart your EC2 instance to fix this.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to identify the root cause of storage issues, manually increase Amazon EBS volume size without downtime, extend the file system to fully utilize the new storage space, and, most importantly, get your website back online—fast! 🚀

Before increasing the EBS volume size, you need to confirm the root cause of the issue. Run the following command to check the disk usage:

df -h

This will display information about your disk space usage. If you see 100% usage on /dev/root, your instance has run out of storage.

To confirm the issue, try writing a test file using:

date > td_tutorialsdojo

If you get an error like:

Then your disk is completely full, and you need to increase your EBS volume size immediately.

Modify the Amazon EBS Volume Size

To expand the storage capacity without stopping your EC2 instance, follow these steps:

1. Access the AWS Management Console

• Sign in to AWS and go to the Amazon EC2 Dashboard.
• In the navigation pane, click Volumes under Elastic Block Store (EBS).

2. Select the Volume to Modify

• Locate the EBS volume attached to your EC2 instance.
• Click the volume, then select Modify Volume from the Actions dropdown.

3. Increase the Volume Size

• In the Modify Volume dialog box, enter the new volume size (e.g., increase from 8 GB to 50 GB).
• Click Modify, then Yes to confirm the change.

4. Wait for the Volume Modification to Complete

• The volume will show a modifying state, then switch to optimizing.
• Your instance will remain operational, and you won’t lose data during this process.

Verify the Changes

To ensure the new storage space is available, run:

df -h

The output should now reflect the increased disk space, confirming the EBS volume size has been successfully expanded.

Conclusion

By identifying the storage issue, modifying the Amazon EBS volume, and resizing the file system, you can restore your website quickly and prevent downtime in the future. This process allows you to scale storage without stopping your EC2 instance, ensuring business continuity.

✅ Your website is now back online! 

The EBS size you provision won’t be exactly the same when you check it using the df tool. In this example, we allocated 50GB, but when we ran df -h, it showed only 48GB available on the server. This happens because some space is reserved for the file system’s metadata and structure. So don’t panic if the numbers don’t match exactly—this is expected behavior.

By following these steps, your AWS infrastructure remains resilient and scalable, keeping your business running smoothly! 🚀