WordPress (free) on an Amazon EC2 Micro Instance (free – for now)

This first post is about how it came to be. A bit philosophical, I know, but that’s the nature of tech sometimes..

This is a version of wordpress (free blog engine) installed in Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing – or Elastic Computing Cloud – or something like that, starting with Elastic and then another two “C” words) (free). Which I think is both thrifty, and tekky geeky, and therefore pretty awesome.

Inspired by Jaimal’s post over on 2bit-coder and an email from Amazon about a free tier, I set about having a go.

The only things needed to change from Jaimal’s tutorial, are that the current free versions of the AWS Linux VM are not quite Fedora; although you do install using yum, you need to log in as “ec2-user” instead of “root”, you always have to whack a “sudo” in front of any command that needs any real privileges, and you can’t use “phpmyadmin” to set up your mysql instance for wordpress, so you have to go old skool and do it by hand.

Anyhoo. Introductions over, next up – more on random web-related tech to follow.

Semi-related references:

How to run WordPress on the NSLU2 (“hacked” router I own that I based some of the wordpress install and setup on)

Mercurial how-to (since I’ve also installed that on my EC2 instance and will follow up on that at some point)

3 thoughts on “WordPress (free) on an Amazon EC2 Micro Instance (free – for now)

  1. I don’t suppose you can walk me through how you set up wordpress on amazon ec2, can you?

    I’ve had nothing but trouble with it, but I have made some progress, but very little. Right now, I’ve created an instance and managed to login using putty and I typed in ec2-user.

    But, what’s next? How do I install php or wordpress.

    I’ll say one thing about Amazon Web Services, they’re not very user friendly.

    I admit, I don’t even qualify as an amateur, and I should probably using some other host. But I still want to try to setup a webpage on Amazon EC2

    • Hi Tosh,

      I finally managed to get through the 500 spam comments on my blog and found your comment on my first post

      Are you still trying to do this? I found my whole command history was saved in my EC2 instance and also blogged another post about this, which might help. Essentially you need to use “sudo” all the time to get root privileges, “yum” is the package manager, “lighttpd” is a nice web server and “nano” is a nice text editor.

      I can take you through the steps I took to get my blog working if you like. Let me know.

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