Hi and welcome to CloudAcademy.com's video series on hosting your WordPress site in the cloud on AWS.

In this video, we'll explore CloudFormation, a simple WordPress creation and hosting option. There's more than one way to set up your WordPress site. We'll discuss manually building and optimizing in other videos in this series.

However, for those who may be more familiar with some simpler hosted options, like WordPress.org or C Panel, AWS CloudFormation is a really competitive approach. Let's click on CloudFormation.

We'll create a new stack. Let's call it my site. We'll select a sample template. CloudFormation builds instances on templates. You can manually create your own template, but that's a whole course all by itself. You could also however, choose pre-filled templates. You could choose templates to work on single instance samples, rather simple website, as we're going to choose this time, on Amazon RDS samples, if you increase the complexity and traffic associated with your WordPress site, you may want to use an RDS sample, or highly available multiple AZ samples. We're going to choose a single instance sample, and we're going to choose a WordPress blog. Click next.

We'll enter a password. We'll stick with the M1 small instance type, and we'll go next again. We could enter keys and values to increase security, but there's no need for that right now. Click on advanced and we are given notification options. We could choose to have our site update us by email for specific events and alerts. We could also select certain options, like timeout rollback on failure, which control how the stack actually will be built.

We'll leave it as it is with no notifications. And we'll click next. There's a review of our stack. Let's create it. The create seems to now be complete. This can take a good few minutes, so don't get too excited if you don't see any progress for awhile. Let's click on outputs. And we're given the website URL, http://ec2. So you see that this WordPress instance is actually being hosted on Amazon. You don't need to build your own server on EC2 or anywhere else.

That's the simplicity of the process. Let's copy the URL, and paste the URL into our browser. And we are actually at the WordPress setup screen. So let's choose United States English, and give it a nice new title, my site. Give us a username, Ubuntu. Enter a password and hit password a second time. Add an email. It's not my real email but this'll do. Allow search engines to index this site. Perhaps not, but normally you would like that because it does drive more traffic to the site, and install WordPress. We're in. Enter our name, Ubuntu, and our password, and log in. It's that simple.