Adding an EC2 Account

EC2 is different from other virtualization systems supported by Cloudmin, as it is a hosted service run by Amazon on their machines. They charge by the hour of machine time, and also for storage of any machine images that you create and host on their S3 service.

Cloudmin can manage virtual systems running under EC2 in almost exactly the same way as it does for other virtualized systems. The biggest difference is that they cannot be shut down without losing the contents of the system, which makes them a little risky for web hosting, as Amazon gives no guarantees of the stability of EC2 instances. Fortunately, Virtualmin makes it easy to backup hosted domains to Amazon's S3 service, which is fast and cheap when accessed from EC2 instances.

Signing Up With Amazon

The first step in the process of using EC2 is to sign up for an account at Amazon's website, https://aws.amazon.com/ . You will need to provide credit card details for billing. If you already have an Amazon account, adding the EC2 service to it is simple.

Once you have an account, you will need to find out the account number, access key and secret key. This can be done by :

  1. Go to https://aws.amazon.com/ , and mouse over the Your Web Services Account button on the right. In the window that pops up, click on AWS Access Identifiers.
  2. The access key is shown under Your Access Key ID . The secret is shown under Your Secret Access Key, when you click the Show link.
  3. Mouse over Your Web Services Account again, and click on Account Activity.
  4. At the top of the page is your Account Number .