In the following tutorial, you will be able to initialize and set up a Ubuntu 16.04 instance in Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2.

Ubuntu instance on Amazon lightsail

First, sign in to AWS and navigate to https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com

On the page, click the Create instance and select Linux/Unix, OS Only and Ubuntu

Scroll to the bottom and select your instance plan. This choice depends on how big you want your wordpress site to be. If you will be posting a lot of pictures, I suggest a larger instance size. For this demo purpose, I will be selecting the $5/month 20GB SSD, with the first month free.

Make your selection, give your instance a name, and hit Create.

You will now be redirected back to the Lightsail dashboard, where you will see your new instance is initializing. After a couple moments, it will say Running and will be a darker gray color.

Now that your instance is initialized, let’s finish setting it up.

Click on the 3 dots and select Manage inside your instance block. You will be taken to the management screen, where you will select Networking.

Under Firewall select Add another and add an HTTPS port 443, and click Save

You can now go back to the Connect tab and click Connect using SSH. AWS will connect you to your instance in a new browser window.

Ubuntu instance on Amazon EC2