An important part of teaching myself to code has been learning the LAMP stack.  LAMP refers to Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and a coding language (I used python).  By tinkering with the entire stack, I developed a better sense of how the components fit together.

This past year I was fortunate enough to have free access to an awesome server, which was  a perfect sandbox.  Last week, I was forced to look for a new solution.  I found a great option in Amazon Web Servers.

Amazon Web Servers (AWS) has a free usage tier which provides a small Linux box for a year.  While there are many AWS products, I was focused on EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) on which you can have you're own cloud based server.  Initial sign-up was easy but then I found an intimidating array of options.  I decided to use this tutorial to set up the LAMP stack and it was a very easy process.  Migrating all of my content from the old server to AWS was simple as well.

There are myriad aspects of AWS which I look forward to exploring.  If you're at all curious, you should sign up for the free tier and start tinkering, too.