How to Give Secure Contractor Access to Amazon EC2 cloud

This tutorial is for all the marketers out there that have a great idea, but need to work with a developer to set up their website or web server.

Amazon EC2 is the most popular cloud hosting service provider. The offer really low hourly rates and many services to make your website reliable and salable.

You never want to give a third party contractor direct access (username/password) to your EC2 admin control panel. Amazon provides security tokens that you can give to each contractor you work with and then when the work is complete you can revoke access to that token.

Steps:

1. Sign up for Amazon EC2 Amazon Web Services -> then click on "Create an AWS Account"
2. After you create an account, in the upper right corner of the admin page you will see your account name. Click on the down arrow
   
3. You will need to create an access key for your contractor
   
4. After you make the access token, you need to give the tokens to the contractor. You should not email them. I recommend setting up a private dropbox account and share a folder with the contractor. Make a text file with the access ID and secret token.
5. The contractor will not be able to access your admin control panel, but will have access to manage your servers using a tool call ElasticFox.

That's it, Now it's time to get your business idea launched.

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If you need any help with launching cloud based servers for your business applications, please send me a PM. I'd be happy to help