I finally got tired of having a woefully over-subscribed Linux server to host the blog and friends.

I finally moved things over to Amazon EC2.

Yes. I’m hosting this on a Linux micro instance, but that seems to be providing enough horsepower to make things go a lot better than before.

What I’m going to do over the next couple of days is present a step-by-step recipe for setting up a WordPress site using Amazon EC2 to be the back-end.

This has many upsides, and a few downsides as well.

I’ll deal with the bad news first: you can’t be afraid of the command line. When interacting with EC2 — especially the Linux variants — the way you work with it is through SSH. You get a friendly command prompt.

My first reaction to that: learn. I suppose that’s going to piss off a lot of people though. It’s not hard though. A few simple commands that you type in instead of using a mouse. In many ways it makes more sense.

The upside, however, is awesome. You get your own Linux machine that you have root access to! The world is now your oyster!

Here’s what I’ll be going over in this short series:

• Overview of costs involved compared to a more traditional web hosting service
• Setting up the EC2 instance and MySQL
• Setting up WordPress, DNS and tying up loose ends

At the end of this you should have a working WordPress blog if you choose to go down this path.

Later on I’ll work on a good backup solution for this as well along with scripts to help with the ongoing maintenance. (Things like removing old log files and so forth)

What you’re reading now was served up on EC2. From doing seat-of-the-pants benchmarking it’s around 2-3 times faster than the GoDaddy server.

More than anything though — I have control of it for real!