Setting up Drupal Cloud Website Hosting with Amazon EC2 Servers

Amazon Web Services EC2

Amazon is offering free micro EC2 instances which, though a little slow, could be a great opportunity to try the Drupal content management system (CMS) for interested folks while saving some expenses. The EC2 instances are cloud-computing slices that offer burst speed for short-term high CPU demand, reasonable amounts of RAM, and even 10GB of storage through their storage service. You even get an "elastic" IP (essentially a static IP so you can point a domain at the server).

Setting up Drupal on Amazon EC2 Server Instances

You can use the free instance to setup a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stack. This is an excellent basis for a Drupal install. I wasn't the only one to think so, check out this great tutorial for getting going and running Drupal on a free EC2 instance. If you'd rather follow a video walkthrough guide to setting up Drupal on a general EC2 instance, the AWS Tutorial folks have done an excellent job:

Amazon's Cloud Website Hosting through EC2 servers is a great testing platform for Drupal if you want to try their free instance level. The cost to upgrade to a slightly higher instance level in order to handle mild production traffic levels is not terribly significant and the solution can scale with your organization as you grow. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers more than just a cloud server, too. Their Relational Database Service (RDS) could be a great path for you to follow if you decide to separate your MySQL database and web servers from each other; a pretty standard practice for more serious production implementations as you start reducing your single points of failure. RDS offers other great features like multiple location failover and constant backups. Amazon's free EC2 level is a great way to get your feet wet with AWS services.

If that all sounds like a bit too much effort, managing your own servers isn't usually a core business competency, Daymuse offers Managed Hosting.

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