Here’s a guide which help me setup an AWS (Amazon Web Services) EC2 server for one of my clients. I used to use their free S3 CND service a few years back; though the process has changed a bit since then; so without further flim-flam.
We’ll be needing PuTTY and FileZilla FTP client for this endeavor. Once you’ve got that sorted, login into your AWS console and proceed to the EC2 link under the Service tab. Once there click launch instance, this will launch a wizard which assist you in creating your machine.
Select the Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
Click on the next steps selecting the defaults until you reach the Security Groups section; once there add the HTTP and HTTPS rules.
After which you will asked to review your settings and prompted to import or add a key pair. Create a new one and save it somewhere safe. Without the key, you will not be able to access the machine, you will not be able to add a new one too.
Download the Key Pair then launch the instance. The instance will take 5-10 minutes to initialize; during that time, process to Network and Security > Elastic IP’s and click Allocate New Address. When the new IP is created, take note of it then right click on the IP and select Associate Address, then select the instance you just made.
When this is done, your machine is not up and running. You can now connect to this virtual machine via PuTTY and Filezilla.
Open Filezilla, on the File menu bar, click on Edit > Settings, then go to SFTP then click Add File. Locate and add the key pair file (.pem) file you downloaded earlier. You will be prompted to convert the .pem file to a .ppk.file, click yes and save that file too.
Now connect via FTP by putting the Elastic IP you created earlier as the host, SFTP as the protocol and ec2-user as the username; this is the default. Leave the password blank. If everything goes well you should be able to connect without any issues.
Now open up PuTTY, use the same IP as the host and connect via SSH. Under Connection > SSH > Auth: Click add file then select the .ppk file created by Filezilla earlier from the original .pem file, then click Open.
Login as the ec2-user and hit enter. If everything worked out, you now have root access to the machine.
From here you can proceed to install and setup the services you need to run a your web server. Below is a quick cheat sheet I used to get mine running.
–update the server sudo yum update –login as super user sudo su –install apache yum install httpd –start apache service httpd start –install php yum install php php-mysql –install mysql yum install mysql-server –start mysql server mysqld start –setup mysql, leave root password blank as default, enter new password then select Y on all questions mysql_secure_installation –set html folder permission chmod -R 775 /var/www/html chown -R ec2-user /var/www/html