In case you lose your Amazon EC2 SSH Key, and can’t login in your instance. This isn’t a big problem if your instance is EBS based and you use an Elastic IP.
1. Upload your new SSH Key, or use one made by AWS
2. Make an AMI of your instance
3. Launch a new machine from your AMI, select the new SSH Key
4. Log in your machine with default user (ubuntu, ec2-user, depends on your original AMI image)
How to get started with AWS free?
Just go to http://aws.amazon.com/free/ and make your account.
Credicard will be needed even for a free account.
What can be done with the free account?
It’s up to you! If you are going to make a light traffic website free tier can handle it. 🙂
You can have up to two EC2 instances (1 Linux, 1 Windows) with 613M Ram and up to 30GB EBS Size. You can go with all your 30GB on a Linux instance it’s the best way to spend your ‘free’ resources. (Windows is memory hungry.)
You can have up to one RDS instance (postgres, mysql, …) with 20GB of DB storage and 20GB for backups.
You can have up to one S3 with 5GB of storage with up to 20k put and 20k get requests.
You can have up to one Memcached server with 213MB
And some more things (ELB, DynamoDB, SNS, CloudWatch, …)