root user creation

[seanieb]

Most VPS hosting providers don't provide the ability to create the root password like the way you can in Linode. A default install of Ubuntu Server wont even let you SSH in as the root user (you need to set up openssh-server too). It might be worth simplifying this initial part of the guide, adding more generalizable steps, as it's not trivial to jump from Linode to AWS, a local VM, etc.

[jkokenge]

I think this is a good idea too. AWS is ubiquitous these days and adapting what is already an absolutely great tutorial and resource to AWS would be a cool addition. I'd be willing to help out with this however I can as well.

[mattmakai]

@seanieb @jkokenge I agree other providers do it differently. I deliberately made the decision to make this an opinionated guide to make it easier for people to choose the specific route of getting a Linode VM. AWS is a completely different beast with EC2 instances & non-persistent storage. it'd have to be an entirely new guide to make that approachable for beginners. Will look into other VPS providers but I haven't used any other ones extensively (well, since Slicehost shut down) so I wouldn't want to recommend them unless I had a good experience. Hearing good things about Digital Ocean so that'd be an option for me to try. Do you have other recommendations?

[dastagg]

I'm using Digital Ocean. The only difference I see: After you create the droplet, you HAVE to connect to the server using 'ssh root@blahblah' and change the initial password that they send you in an email.

Then put that new password in fabfile.py and everything else is the same.