Linux Server Setup On Amazon EC2
These are the steps to setup a server from scratch using an EC2 on AWS(Amazon Web Services). If you do not already have an account you can create one here.
Once your account is created and you’re logged in, type EC2 in the search box at the top of your screen and click on the service.
You can navigate to Instances on the left panel and click on the big orange Launch instances button at the upper right of the screen that appears or just click the one that appears on the EC2 dashboard.
Give your EC2 a name and select an AMI from the quick start section, for my purposes I chose the Ubuntu AMI. The quick start option you choose selects an instance type for you automatically but you can change that to suit your needs.
Scroll down to the key pair section, you can proceed without a key pair by clicking the drop down and selecting that option if you’re just testing this out however if you’re using this to host a production stage web application you have to click the create a key pair link to create one.
Give your key pair a name and choose a type and format, I prefer to use the RSA type along with the ppk format since I use putty for ssh. Click the create key pair button when you’re done.
Next we head to the network section, you can check the “Allow SSH traffic” and “Allow HTTP traffic from the internet” check boxes and call it a day. However If you know what you’re doing and want to set up your own rules then be my guest.
Once that is done you can leave everything else and look for the launch instance button at the creation summary section and click it to create your EC2 instance.
The instance gets created in a minute or less and takes an extra few more to run health checks to make sure everything works fine and viola you have your instance.
You can click on the instance ID to get access to more information about your instance, for example the public Ipv4 address which you and everyone else will use to access whatever you host on said instance.
Furthermore you can click the connect button to access the options of how you can connect to your instance.
This brings us to the end of this simple and easy server setup on EC2.