[devit]

It's not clear, but my interpretation is that they contacted every account holder, somehow convinced them to migrate (perhaps with discounts and/or threats of termination) and then shut down once everyone migrated.

Would be very interesting to learn how that was possible, it seems surprising to me that there wasn't even one instance that the owner forgot about or just was unwilling to do any work on.

It's possible that credit card expiration was the key, as that may have automatically disabled almost all forgotten accounts.

[crabbone]

They don't need to threaten. Their SLAs don't offer to run VMs indefinitely. AWS will send you an email about shutting down your VM if, eg. they need to rotate the disk used for storing VM image etc. It's somewhere there in the contract, and it's a usual process for someone who keeps long-running VMs in EC2.

[devit]

Do they really not do live migration or at least auto-restart (if configured) in those cases?

[acdha]

They have live migration now (for many years) but they didn’t back in the early era. I’m not sure they set it up for the classic environment but I think they must have - in the early 2010s you could get notices that your VM’s host had failed or was about to fail and you needed to launch a new one but I think that stopped by around 2015 as I had servers running for a deprecated project which were finally shutdown this decade and it seems like rather good luck not to have any failures in 7+ years on old hardware.

[crabbone]

I received last such email about a year ago for a VM in either free-tier or like the cheapest one available. This probably has to do with VM flavor you choose as well as with the time you created it.

[acdha]

Definitely possible - I only had about ten old servers but that’s a nice stretch without a hardware failure.

[tekla]

Its your responsibility to make your systems resistant to failure