A while ago, I wrote an article about the steps required to set up a web server that runs the Drupal content management system (like this site). Â Enough has changed in the interim that I figured I'd revisit this article with more up-to-date information. Â In particular, Amazon just introduced their micro instances, which offer you the ability to host a website for as little as $5 a month.

UPDATE: Fixed a small typo (mksf.xfs should have been mkfs.xfs)

You might notice that this site is running a little faster. This is because I have decided to try out hosting my site from within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is part of Amazon's Web Services, which also include the popular Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and Simple Queue Service. Briefly, Amazon has decided to open up the computing capabilities and bandwidth of its data centers to the world, and has been steadily adding services and features over the last couple of years. A couple of weeks ago, they added a feature to their EC2 service that made it practical to run a web site from their cloud.

Recently, I presented this site at the Madison (WI) Drupal meetup and promised to put in writing my comments on its design, as well as post the code for the theme that I used. Read on if you are interested in the details of how I built this site.