Notes currently being written – will be completed very soon.

Welcome to the Solar Polar website which at the time of this post is running a WordPress install hosted on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance.

I’ve started with a micro instance simply because this website doesn’t have many visitors. If I start with the smallest option available then I’ll be able to measure how much better it is than my previious install on a shared server provided by Heart Internet.

I’m going to list each step that I took to get this far. In summary we will;

startup a micro instance with the correct security group (port) access
assign our instance an elastic IP address and then bind the domain name
install mysql, apache, phpmyadmin & wordpress
create database / wordpress install
ensure permalinks / media uploads / folder permissions are all working

There’s much more we can do with this machine and because this website isn’t critical in any way it’s a great opportunity to learn some nerdy stuff, so things for the near future of the site and this post;

install and FTP server
ensure security
allow virtual hosts so that we can host multiple domain / sites on the same machine

Credits

We all “Google” for answers and I did the same to try and quickly figure out how to get this website up and running. My main resources are from the following links:

Christophe Coenraets – http://coenraets.org/blog/2012/01/setting-up-wordpress-on-amazon-ec2-in-5-minutes/
Caleb Ogden – http://calebogden.com/wordpress-on-linux-in-the-amazon-cloud-with-mac/
Devin Griffiths – http://www.devingriffiths.com/archive/2011/06/launching-a-free-wordpress-blog-using-amazon-cloud-ec2/

As ever – the notes here are for my own use (and act as my personal backup if any reference sites go that way of the Do-Do). They might be handy to someone else in the same boat. If any of the guys above wishes me to remove anything I’ll happily do so.

Installing WordPress on Amazon EC2

1 – Setting up an Amazon Account

This is pretty easy. You need a credit card to register your account because it’ll cost you to run an Amazon machine… even though if you’re a new customer a micro instance should be free for the first 12 months.

2 – Choosing your AMI

3 – Getting you instance running

4 – Installing Everything you’re gonna need

5 – Issues

Uploaded Images not resizing down the media settings

This was due to PHP-GD not being installed. A simple “yum install pgp-gd” did the trick along with a restart of Apache.

Permalinks not working

Erm… cannae remember this!!! Will discover on my picture walkthrough!

Installing VSFTPD for Amazon Linux

When connecting using my Filezilla client the connection got stuck because I hadn’t set it to “Active”.

When set as “Default” it would not allow me to List a directory and therefore froze.

Once passed that bit I tried to transfer a file but got a 553 error.

“553 Could not create file”

This was because of user/group permissions on the folders I was trying to transfer to.

I used the chown command to change the ownership of my ftp user / group for the given directory.

– chown -R username:groupname folderineed

Yoast SEO plugin reported – “does not support PHP’s Document Object Mode”

Solution was to install PHP=XML and restart Apache.

– yum install php-xml
– service httpd restart