0.03c/hour (14€/month) is pretty cheap for a small server so lets try this 🙂

Generate and download a key-pair, so you can login to the instance via ssh.

AMI-id used is a micro ebs ubuntu 10.04 instance on eu-west-1, choose your own at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/release

Be sure to add ssh port to your security group or you will get a nice “port 22: Connection timed out”

Start the servers!

require 'fog'
fog = Fog::Compute.new(
  :provider => 'AWS',
  :region=>'eu-west-1',
  :aws_access_key_id => 'yyy',
  :aws_secret_access_key => 'xxxx'
)

# start a server
server = fog.servers.create(
  :image_id=>'ami-311f2b45',
  :flavor_id=>'t1.micro',
  :key_name => 'pey-pair-name'
)

# wait for it to get online
server.wait_for { print "."; ready? }

# public address -> ec2-79-125-45-252.eu- west-1.compute.amazonaws.com -> ssh into it
server.dns_name

# instance id -> find it again
fog.servers.get(server.id)

# shutdown
server.destroy

Connect via ssh

ssh -i KEY-PAIR.pem ubuntu@SERVER-DNS-NAME