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Getting Started with Amazon EC2 (1 year free AWS VPS web hosting)

Published 2013-1-11

Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/A65EMIId_YA

Amazon Web Services

  1. Google "Amazon Web Service Free Tier"
  2. http://aws.amazon.com/
  3. Login (or sign-up)

NOTE: It will likely fail to verify your address. Ignore the error (it's one-time only), scroll down, check the agree box, and continue again.

Free Usage Tier

  1. http://aws.amazon.com/
  2. My Account / Console
  3. AWS Management Console
  4. EC2 Virtual Servers in the Cloud
  5. Select Region (next to Help in top right)
  6. Launch Instance (specific to region)
  7. Choose Ubuntu 12.04 micro (free usage tier)
  8. Downlad the pem file
  9. Continue

Managing the Instance

  1. Instances
  2. Elastic IP
  3. Allocate New Address
  4. Associate Address

Logging in from Mac / Linux

Host User ubuntu IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-aws-key.pem

Logging in from windows

  1. Open puttygen
  2. Go to the conversion tab
  3. Load the pem file
  4. Click save private key
  5. Open putty
  6. Put the host as ubuntu@
  7. Load the pem file
  8. Save the profile for later use

COST WARNING

It is extremely important that you your type show up as t1.micro and that you terminate the instance before your year is up. It's also important that you not exceed the bandwidth quota.

This is just to get a flavor for a VPS, not a true VPS solution. It is useful for Cloud Computing Services, but that's a different use case.

Use [ChunkHost][chunkhost-affiliate], Linode, or [ThrustVPS][thrustvps-affiliate] (cheap, but occasionally slow) for long-term / production use.

Errata

  • By "good for VPSes and Web Development" I meant "good for VPSes and Local Development"
  • By "we can safely allow all TCP" I didn't mean "safe"... I meant "for the sake of ease"

Colloquialisms (Jargon)

slashdot effect

Back in the old days we didn't have http://reddit.com, we had http://slashdot.com. The slashdot effect is when someone posts an article (ostensibly on slashdot) about your site or service that drives unexpected traffic to your server and causes it to become very slow or fail to respond to requests entirely. (one server can only handle so much, you see)

64-bit

Back in the old days we had 8-bit 8088 CPUs, barely fit to work as a calculator. Then there was the 16-bit 286, and finally the 32-bit 386 which, with a few enhancements here and there, has stuck around for the past 25 years. The only real problem with 32-bit was that it meant that a computer could have only 4GiB of RAM, which was good enough until around 2000 when we decided that 640 KiB *definitely isn't enough for anyone. The 64-bit x86_64 was created to solve this problem. Although the memory bus on a motherboard is often only really 42-bits or so, the processor must be a power of 2.


By AJ ONeal

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