Table of contents
BitNami Cloud Hosting is powered by Amazon, the global leader in Cloud Computing. The Amazon Cloud runs on tens of thousands of servers and spans multiple geographic and availability zones across the globe. You must have the Amazon Web Services account in order to use BitNami Cloud Hosting.
Sign up for AWS account
Learn how to sign up for the AWS account below.
If you already have one and you want to start using BitNami Cloud Hosting, then check that you are subscribed to the required services and go to Collect AWS credentials info.
Go to http://aws.amazon.com and click Sign Up Now button. You may also visit this AWS account activity page what will bring you to the signup form presented below. Fill in the form with your email address and new password. Do not forget to select "I am a new user" option.
Type your email address once again and click Create account.
Fill in your Contact information and click Continue.
You will see a message that your new AWS account has been created.
Sign Up for Amazon EC2
If your Amazon account was created before October 2011, you may also need to subscribe to the Amazon EC2 services.
1. Please go to the following URL:
https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/manageYourAccount
2. Confirm that "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)", "Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)" and "Elastic Block Store (EBS)" are listed as services you are signed up for.
3. If they are listed as services that you are not signed up for, you should click the button "Add Now" next to them and follow the instructions.
Can I use my AWS IAM user credentials
Please note that BitNami Cloud Hosting creates temporary IAM users to perform different operations. You need to make sure that your AWS IAM identity has enough permissions to add those intermediate users.
You can apply the following policy:
{
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "iam:*",
"Resource": "arn:aws:iam::123456781234:user/bitnami-hosting-operators/*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["ec2:*", "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics"],
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}
Replace the 123456781234 value with your Amazon account id.
Collect AWS credentials info
You need to gather the AWS credentials to be able to configure your BitNami Cloud Hosting account properly.
Go to your AWS account page.
Go to Security Credentials section that shows your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. You can write these down or copy and paste them into your BitNami Cloud Hosting account when you are prompted to during the setup process.
Troubleshooting
You may check the current status of Amazon data centres at this page: http://status.aws.amazon.com
Billing
Please visit our AWS cost calculator at this page.
AWS Free Tier
Amazon provides a free usage tier that allows you to run a micro instance for free and provides a fair amount of disk space and bandwidth usage. Combined with our free tier, it allows you to run your favorite open source applications on the cloud free of charge.
AWS Free Tier servers still show as charges in the BCH console
If you signed up for your Amazon account after November 1st 2010, you are eligible for one year of use of a free micro instance, plus some other free services from Amazon. You can find more details on what is available free of charge here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ As long as you meet the criteria and your usage limits are within those provided on that page, you will not incur any charges from Amazon. The charges that we display in the BitNami Cloud Hosting (BCH) console are based on Amazon’s normal rates – we do not yet have the ability to account for any free services from Amazon within the BCH console. So, if you are looking at the BCH console, what you’re seeing are the charges that you would incur from Amazon if you were not eligible for the free service (or once your eligibility expires), not the actual charges that you will be billed for from Amazon.
Current AWS usage
The BitNami Cloud Hosting shows estimated costs, as AWS does not currently provide an API to retrieve them. You can check your exact AWS usage at this page.
Is Static IP address free of charge?
Static IP addresses are free when they are attached to an instance. When you shut an instance down, it is no longer ‘attached’, and you will therefore be charged $0.005 per hour until the server is running again. You have to pay $3.6/month to keep the same IP address on a server if it isn’t running.
Static IP addresses can be deleted via BitNami Hosting: go to Clouds/Manage on the left menu, select the cloud account and click ‘Manage Static IPs’ button in the details panel. Please note that you will not be able to attach the same IP address again later.
FAQ
Sending emails from EC2 instances
We recommend using an external smtp server for sending emails from EC2 instances because there are some limitations on AWS EC2 machines. Please take a look at this AWS FAQ:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Are_there_any_limitations_in_sending_email_from_EC2_instances
Please also take a look at this wiki article explaining how to configure PHP to send emails using Gmail account.
How do I get more than 5 static IP addresses
In order to increase the amount of static IP addresses you should send a request to the AWS team using this form: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/eip_limit_request/
What is a micro instance?
A micro instance, or micro server, is a cloud server with 638 MB of RAM that allows for up to 2 Elastic Compute Units or ECUs. An ECU is the equivalent of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. Micro instances are good for low throughput applications or development.
Learn more
Learn more about Amazon Web Services at:
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