I spent 4 hrs today setting up an Amazon ec2 instance. I screwed up one configuration file and broke everything. Grrrrrrr.

Never been through that. Why it is so tough. I used to start new instance using community Ubuntu 16.04 one. You guys do something different? If so? Why is it ?

@Gowtham95india I'd installed a ton of packages and set up multiple users. When I messed up the configuration file, I had to create a new instance. Like you mentioned, creating a new one is fairly trivial. It's been a great opportunity to learn more about Linux administration. I still think digital Ocean provides an easier out of the box server, but AWS provides significantly better scalability and customization.