I know next to nothing about networking/servers. So I'm assuming I'm missing something obvious. All of the resources I can find on this, either don't work or are outdated. I created a brand new AWS account on the free plan. I created a postgres RDS DB instance. I made sure that this RDS instance is set to publicly accessible. This RDS instance has the default VPC/Security Group settings. In order to connect to this DB from my local machine, I used pgadmin3 and followed the instructions provided on the AWS documentation page. Seen here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ConnectToPostgreSQLInstance.html I've double checked all of the information required to connect: Host: whatever.whatever.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com Port: 5432 Username: USERNAME Password: PASSWORD When I try to connect to the database, my connection fails due to a timeout. (During step 4 in the above guide.) Can anyone point me to whatever I am missing? Thanks in advance