With the Government Shutdown looming recently, a few buddies at work came to me with an idea for a website that would showcase deals for government workers throughout the DC area.  The idea went into motion at 5:00 on Friday, which was about 7 hours before the shutdown was suppose to take place.  My job was to get a server up quickly, and get Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com) installed and working, so the others could begin marketing the site.  This meant I needed a server that was capable of PHP with CURL installed, MySQL, and it had to have the capabilities of clean URL’s.  This gave me the perfect opportunity to see how far I had come, since I had begun playing with the AWS (Amazon Web Service) platform.

Now, a little background…I am not a server guy.  I do know enough to get around a Linux box, and I certainly know how to Google, and regardless of what my girlfriend says…I can follow instructions pretty well.  That is how I have gotten this far.  So, if you hit a road block, toss a question at Google, or you can certainly ask me.  I believe in sharing this knowledge I have gained over the years and I absolutely love learning new things, so we will more than likely be helping each other out.

So, onward!  Over the next several blogs I am going to outline how I got this site up and running.  Overall, the process took about 30 minutes, but I want to be as detailed as possible, and provide screen-shots and code snippets, of exactly what I am talking about, so I am going to be breaking it up, into several different blogs.

• Part 1 will take your through creating an EC2 instance using an Ubuntu Community AMI.
• Part 2 will introduce you to Amazon Security Groups.
• Part 3 will take you through connecting to the server setting up LAMP, CURL, Mod Rewrite, SFTP, phpMyAdmin, and add Users.
• Part 4 will show you how to install Ushahidi and WordPress.