AWS — How to Host a LAMP Web Application Server on AWS EC2 For Free

Shawn Shi
4 min readJun 14, 2018

UPDATED 2020/10/16:
- I walked through this exercise again.
- All of the screenshots have been updated so that this article is accurate for the new EC2 experience in 2020!
- All commands have been updated so that newer versions of MySQL and PHP are installed.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is by far the best cloud service on the market. Its free tier allows everyone to run EC2 instances for up to 750hours per month, which means we can host a web application server for free! This article covers how to quickly launch an…

Shawn Shi

Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Ex-Machine Learning Engineer. When I am not building applications, I am playing with my kids or outside rock climbing!