I, recently, switched to the EC2 virtual instance. I wanted to check if the website is online. As usual I used the “ping” command. I thought my server was down (kinda freaked out) but the website on the browser was working fine.

All I needed to do was to enable the ICMP requests:

1) Log into AWS account.
2) Click on “Security Groups”. Choose the required security group.
3) Click on the “Inbound” tab.

Create a new rule: Custom ICMP rule
Type: Echo request
Source: 0.0.0.0/0

0.0.0.0 will allow everyone to ping your server. You can specify your own addresses if you want.

That’s it.