After rather successful year of using WordPress, I have decided to move my blog to AWS. I was considering the move for long time, motivated by Free Tier and finally I found some time to do it.

At first, I have created WordPress Stack using CloudFormation, but personally I prefer Ubuntu over Amazon Linux and I will focus on configuration of Ubuntu EC2 instance here.

1. Export your existing blog
   WP-Admin > Tools > Export

2. Login to AWS console and Create Key Pair
3. Launch EC2 instance
   I use Ubuntu HVM. I recommend t2.micro, as it’s free for the first year. You should specify created/uploaded key.

4. Login to your EC2 instance using Public DNS or IP and your key

   ssh -i .aws/your_key.pem ubuntu@ec2xxxxx.compute.amazonaws.com

   NOTE: you key should be readable only by you. To achieve that, you can do:

   chmod 600 .aws/your_key.pem

5. Configure Ubuntu

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-auth-mysql mysql-server
   

6. Configure MySQL

   sudo mysql_secure_installation
   mysql -uroot -p
   
   CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
   CREATE USER 'wordpress' IDENTIFIED BY 'SOMEPASS';
   GRANT ALL ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpress';
   

7. Configure wordpress

   sudo -i
   cd /var/www/html/
   wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
   tar xpfz latest.tar.gz
   rm latest.tar.gz
   cd wordpress/
   mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
   sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
   
   # edit wp-config.php
   define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');
   define('DB_USER', 'wordpress');
   define('DB_PASSWORD', 'SOMEPASS');
   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
   

8. Configure Apache

   # edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf
   
   ServerName ec2xxxxx.compute.amazonaws.com
   ServerAlias YOURDOMAIN.COM
   DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wordpress
   DirectoryIndex index.php
   
   AllowOverride All
   Order Deny,Allow
   Allow from all
   
   # enable wordpress in apache2
   sudo a2ensite wordpress
   sudo service apache2 restart
   

9. Enable HTTP access to your EC2 instance
   Go to EC2 console > Instances > Select you instance > Description >
   Click on your `Security group` > Select Inbound > Edit > Add rule > HTTP > Save

10. Point your webrowser to your EC2 instance: http://ec2xxxxx.compute.amazonaws.com/
11. Setup your wordpress account
12. Upload dumped wordpress data
    WP-Admin > Tools > Import > WordPress > > Upload file import
    NOTES:
    You will need to install WordPress Importer plugin.

13. Assign post to correct user.
    Don’t forget to Import Attachments!

14. Install your favourite plugins and themes
    As for plugins, I strongly recommend: JetPack, SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP and BackUpWordPress or ajax-load-more.

15. Add favicon
    Copy selected favicon.ico to /var/www/html/wordpress

Voilà!
BTW: You may want to increase security of your instance and setup swap just in case memory usage exceeds your EC2 instance size.