In the six years since I wrote the first site, the web and the technologies that power it has changed significantly – and for me, this refresh of the site is also a great opportunity to learn more about new server-side technologies and tools, such as Amazon’s cloud-based web services. With a number of constraints in mind, I ended up deciding to host the site on AWS because of the ease of administration, deployment, scaling, and reliability, even if this site doesn't necessarily stress all those factors. This page you are reading now is proudly served from a micro EC2 instance, with most of the static content including images and the old site archive are served directly from S3.

By taking advantage of Amazon’s free tier, access to these services (and many others) are free for a full year. Setup was relatively painless using Amazon’s AWS Management Console along with some helpful advice from Rhys and Justin.

Each instance starts bare (depending on the machine image that it is based on), which allows you complete freedom to install whatever services you need. In my case, the primary packages we needed were nginx, PHP, the Kohana MVC framework, MySQL, and Memcached. We’ve had experience using nginx at BumpTop, and it is a reliable and efficient (in both cpu and memory) alternative to Apache – which is important on our micro EC2 instance. Kohana is, in my limited experience, a great MVC framework that provides a nice balance between the convenience and utility of a framework, and the freedom of being able to work around certain framework features. I have not yet found myself fighting the framework to do what I need, as I did while experimenting with web.py, django (and less so in Google App Engine), and Kohana is noticeably lighter than other heavy PHP frameworks like Zend, Symfony and Cake. The only downsides I’ve encountered so far are the limited number of tutorials and API instability between minor versions (eg. 3.0 vs 3.1) due to the rapid pace of development. In general, the machine setup was mainly a lesson in learning the linux tools (apt-get is your friend), getting around the linux filesystem, configuring and reconfiguring services, editing config files, and reacquainting myself with vim. Maybe I’ll make a quick post later describing my vim configuration, as I find it super handy when working directly on the server.

Some setup issues I ran into that were frustrating (with potential workarounds):

• My .bash_profile only gets applied once – That’s because .bash_profile only gets executed for login shells, so if you change user using sudo or su, then only .bashrc gets executed. You can source one from the other for a quick fix
• Old packages on the AMI – Run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade first to make sure you have the latest tools/packages
• EC2 instance IP keeps changing – Attach an Elastic IP to your instance (it’s free)
• Binding a domain name to an EC2 instance – Add/change the A record in the DNS entries where your domain was registered
• My site is not loading – Ensure that the server_name regex is correct, and that you are not falling back to the default server config (rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default)
• I’m not seeing my newly-installed module in phpinfo() – You need to restart php-fastcgi for the new module to be picked up
• Problems with Kohana – Read the docs again, remember to add a rewrite rule in nginx to map uris through the Kohana index file (rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?kohana_uri=$1 last;)
• Certain pages show permissions denied – Add your user to www-data (using adduser), and make sure the www-data group owns /var/www and has access to it (chmod -R 770)
• Can’t find AWS-SDK classes – Add the AWS-SDK directory to your path, or require it at the top of the PHP file (require_once("$root/aws-sdk/sdk.class.php");)
• Uploads greater than N megabytes fail – You need to edit php.ini (found in /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini) and increase the values post_max_size, upload_max_filesize, max_file_uploads (if it is a result of too many files at once), as well as client_max_body_size in your nginx server config file (eg. /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite.com)
• I’m tired of typing my IP – Add an entry in your /etc/hosts to point yoursite.com to the elastic IP
• Git fails with Permission Denied – You need to add the git user to your sshd_config file, and use the correct public key when initializing gitosis (and make sure that key has the right permissions)

And a quick cheat-sheet:

And that's it. Easy right? :)