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Connect AWS EC2

AWS EC2 is the right pick if your company already standardizes on AWS. A t3.micro On-Demand instance (2 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) runs about $7.30/month in US East (N. Virginia), Linux pricing.

What you need: an AWS account and an IAM access key scoped to EC2. DotDeployer never touches any other AWS service in your account.

Steps:

  1. In IAM, create a user with EC2 permissions and generate an access key.
  2. In DotDeployer, go to Settings → Providers, choose AWS EC2, and paste the access key in. It’s encrypted before it’s stored.
  3. From Servers, click “Create server,” pick AWS EC2, and choose a size and any AWS region.
  4. Add your first site from a GitHub repo — DotDeployer provisions the instance and deploys it.

Billing: the EC2 instance runs in your own AWS account and is billed to you directly, the same as any other AWS resource.

Key scope: the access key can only do what the IAM policy you attach allows — scope it to EC2 (and optionally a specific instance) and DotDeployer never sees the rest of your AWS account.

Plain EC2, not a PaaS: DotDeployer provisions a plain EC2 instance and manages it over SSH, the same agentless model as every other provider — not Elastic Beanstalk or App Runner — so nothing about your setup is AWS-specific.

Once connected, AWS EC2 behaves exactly like every other provider in DotDeployer: the same Servers table, the same site tabs, the same deploy and rollback flow.

The DotDeployer Settings → Providers screen with AWS EC2 connected