I made this site mostly just to mess around with Amazon EC2. I've had a couple S3 buckets for ten years or so, but I never really thought about trying out EC2 until recently. I have sites hosted with Linode and I'm happy with them. I think I may also have been scared off by trying to figure out Amazon's monstrously complex AWS dashboards.

The other day I realized that Amazon has a free tier for a year, which allows you to run one EC2 instance for free. So I decided to try it out. The set-up was not quite as easy as Linode was, and I was frightened and confused by the various complexities in the process such as security groups and VPCs.

I followed this tutorial to get the instance launched, which was not too complicated. Once I got the instance running then I ran into a few difficulties. First off, I couldn't figure out how to connect to the instance from a browser. You need to open up the ports in a security group, which I did, but it still didn't work. I was trying to figure it out and thought maybe I needed to set up a VPC or something, but there was already one created. After spending a few hours trying to figure this out I went back and looked at the security group I had set up before and the inbound port rules that I had set up before were not there. I still have no idea where they went, but I put them back and from there everything was easy.

I still have a few little glitches with EC2, but those have to do with my Apache config, not with anything having to do with Amazon. I needed something to put on this server so I copied the code from my other personal web site and adjusted it a bit and here we are.

Libellés: personal, technical