EC2 + Ubuntu 12.04 + LAMP 2 Server Setup checklist

My steps:

Install stuff

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo tasksel install lamp-server
sudo apt-get install subversion phpmyadmin php5-curl

• Add Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf to somewhere in your Apache Config files to enable it
• Use http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/ to generate passwords
• Uncomment store-plaintext-passwords = no in /home/ubuntu/.subversion/servers so svn stops bugging you about it

Security

• Change the Apache ServerToken to make it harder for others to guess what OS you are using like this
• Remove PHP x-powered-by HTTP header to make it harder for others to guess what PHP version you are using like this
• Generate good passwords for all types of accounts: http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/
• Run PHPSecInfo and see what it thinks: http://phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/

Backups

• MySQL - via bash script and S3

Monitoring

• AWS - set up CloudWatch to watch Status and CPU usage

Other Tweaks

• Consider removing the fuser bit from the /etc/cron.d/php5 fragment because it can cause CPU usage spikes