Linux newbie here. Used ec2 image for over six months now. The only problem I had is that sometimes google did not answer my linux questions on first page, and

Linux newbie here. Used ec2 image for over six months now. The only problem I had is that sometimes google did not answer my linux questions on first page, and I had to tweak the search query a little. Yes, starting is a little weird, but once you create your ami(the os) everything works great. There are free public images ready for development and I am using one of the Right Scale CentOS images. Six months ago I did not know anything about PuTTY, WinSCP, Crons, nohups, mc, installing software packages easily(which really surprised me). Thank you Yum. Backing up your data is needed, but it is needed anywhere anyway. I've restarted that instance once in six months and it was not needed at all. Just had to test restart functionality :)