I have an Amazon EC2 instance that is running a simple LAMP stack with Amazon's flavor of linux. I want to stop it and add more disk space. We will need more than our current 8 gigabytes.

I was wondering:

1) When I stop my instance what will be lost? Will the content of /var/www be lost? What does this mean? I am sure my instance isn't a spot instance.

1.5) What is an ephemeral disk? Is my instance completely ephemeral? Are parts of it ephemeral? When I press "stop", probably, not everything is cleared. So what is cleared?

2) Amazon has tools in the Management Console to facilitate enlarging an instance?

3) Will I have to re-partition the instance? Can an instance expand the partition it is running on?