Amazon WordPress blog with own domain name - Set It Up Yourself
This article describes steps to start a Word Press blog site in Amazon Cloud and assign domain name to it.
Amazon AWS account
Valid Amazon account is needed to start exploring Amazon Web Services. Valid email and credit card are needed to sign up. Amazon will charge credit card to verify it. Once the credit card is confirmed, Amazon will refund validation charge of 1USD.
If provided email for your account has not been used before to open an account, Amazon will allow 750 hours without charges per month for a year to work with instances and some of the associated infrastructure.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform offers launching of computing instance in the cloud. Virtual machine may be launched from EC2 Dashboard in AWS Management console.
For this exercise, virtual machine will be picked as one belonging to Free Tier and being from ‘AWS Marketplace’ . Filtering on ‘wordpress’ and selecting ‘Free’ for ‘‘Software Pricing Plan’’ will list available instances.
Any instance may be picked. For this exercise, I’ve picked:
Steps to select, configure and launch an instance are most accurately described in original AWS document Launch a WordPress WebSite. After you go through all the steps, you should have your Word Press Blog up and running.
Registering Domain
Domain may be registered at many places. I have used NameCheap for several of my previous projects, and I’ve done the same for this project. It might take a day or two to get your domain registered with ICANN.
Connect AWS instance with registered domain
Log into NameCheap.com and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Open NameCheap Dashboard (under your account)/select Domain List.
Click on Manage for the domain you want to assign to AWS instance
On Domain details page, select Advanced DNS tab. Find ‘Host Records’ and notice two records: CNAME and URL redirect
On AWS EC2 page, from Network & Security section find and open Elastic IPs page.
Select ‘Allocate New Address’ from Amazon pool of addresses based on your EC2 instances and confirm allocation. Resulting allocation will be confirmed.
Close the page and select ‘Associate Address’ from the Actions menu for selected IP address.
Associate address through Resource type.
Message will indicate successful association.
The changes in “Elastic IPs” will be reflected on public IP address of the EC2 instance.
Make a note of public IP address and public DNS for use on NameCheap/Domain List page.
On NameCheap dashboard with Domain List Details, locate Host column with with “@” and a Type to set it to ‘A Record’. Set value to public IP address of your instance.
For record with ‘www’ in Host column, set Type to ‘CNAME Record’ and Value to public DNS
Click Save All Changes or Save them record by record.
Now you may try to connect to your WordPress blog by using blog web address. For me this hasn’t worked immediately. First, it takes some time for domain registration to be propagated. NameCheap estimates 24 hours to 48 hours. My domain was registered in less then a day. To associate domain with an instance will take significantly shorter time. For my site association took about an hour. Time will vary from case to case.
Financial component of this exercise is also important. Assuming that for a first year you can start a WordPress instance free of charge, your only expense will be a domain registration. NameCheap has some top Level Domain with special price — .info was 1.99 USD/year at the time of its debut.
My goal, to set site reasonably quickly and using relatively simple steps, has been achieved. In that process I learned several things by reading about some topics I’ve encountered in setting the site. Now let’s do some blogging:
