Installing XCache on Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services Logo

We’ve been benchmarking Amazon EC2 server instances for some highly complicated PHP applications over the past week. During this time, we’ve discovered that XCache is perhaps the best opcode caching product for our purposes. If anyone would like a walkthrough for installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance, simply leave a comment below and we …

Read more

How to Safely Update Linux in AWS EC2 Micro Instance – Using Yum

Often, when logging into via SSH to an Amazon EC2 instance, you are told that there are several updates (usually including security updates) waiting to be updated on your system. The panel on Amazon Linux even goes so far as to explain how one might go about updating to this version. HOWEVER, as this may …

Read more

How to Setup FTP (FTPS (not SFTP)) on an AWS EC2 Instance

Below are the commands required to setup FTP (well, FTPS in fact, and specifically not SFTP, which you can most easily use by adding your security certificate to your FTP program and accessing over SSH) on your AWS EC2 cloud instance. I’m assuming you use the AWS flavour of Linux. If you do not use …

Read more

AWS EC2 Instance Won’t Stop

If you use a lot – or even just one – EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), from time-to-time, you might find that an instance becomes unresponsive, you can’t get in via SSH, and, when in the AWS console, the instance just won’t stop! When this happens, you select “Stop” in the console, and …

Read more

Allow HTTPS on Amazon EC2

If you have recently setup an Amazon EC2 instance and would like to configure access to Port 443 (HTTPS:// traffic) on your new instance, there are a few things you should do. First Step – Allow Port 443 in your Security Group Firstly, you need to tell your EC2 instance that it is allowed to …

Read more

Linux & Apache Server – Set Local Time to London, UK, Europe

A quick and simple command you might need from time-to-time if you’re running apache webservers in one or other Linux flavour. We often grab EC2 instances on Amazon, for example, for our clients and, for various reasons, we want the server to know what time it is here in the UK! So here’s the command …

Read more

How to Make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails Work

If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …

Read more

Installing APC on Amazon EC2 Instance

Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …

Read more