How I Secured My First EC2 Instance (And Didn’t Get Hacked) AWS for Beginners – Part 3

Okay, real talk—when I launched my first EC2 instance, I was hyped. That feeling of spinning up your own server on the cloud? Felt like I had unlocked a new level. 😎

But then came the what now? moment.

I saw all these terms: key pair, security group, SSH, port 22... and my excitement turned into confusion real quick.

So if you're just starting out like I was, this blog is for you. I'm going to walk you through how I set up my EC2 instance securely, without frying my brain. No boring lectures. Just real stuff from my own experience.

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🛡️ Why Security Matters (Even for Beginners)

When you're playing around on AWS, it's easy to ignore security because you're just "learning". But trust me—even a simple mistake like opening your EC2 to everyone can attract bots, brute-force attacks, or worse.

I learned this early. And it was a wake-up call. So here’s how I made sure my EC2 was safe (and how you can too).

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🔑 Step 1: Creating a Key Pair – My EC2’s House Key

This part felt cool and a bit spy-movie-like.

• I went to the EC2 Dashboard > Key Pairs

• Clicked Create Key Pair

• Gave it a cool name like aws-master-key (felt like a hacker already 😅)

• And BAM! It downloaded a .pem file

👉 Pro tip from me: Save that file in a safe place. AWS doesn’t give it to you again. I repeat—**DO NOT LOSE IT.
(It’s like losing the only key to your house.)

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🔐 Step 2: Setting Up Security Groups – My EC2’s Bodyguards

I used to think: “Why all this firewall stuff? I just wanna deploy stuff.”
Then I understood—Security Groups are the gatekeepers. They decide who can talk to your instance and through which ports.

Here's what I did:

• While launching the instance, I created a new security group

• For inbound rules, I added:

  • Type: SSH

  • Port: 22

  • Source: My IP only (Trust me, don’t use "Anywhere" unless you like living dangerously 😅)

That way, only my system could access the EC2 via SSH. It felt powerful and safe.

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💻 Step 3: The First Connection – SSH-ing Like a Pro (Or at Least Trying 😅)

Now came the moment of truth. Connecting to my EC2 using that .pem file.

I opened my terminal and typed:

bashCopyEditchmod 400 aws-master-key.pem
ssh -i "aws-master-key.pem" ec2-user@your-ec2-public-ip

Hit enter... and boom, I was inside my cloud server.
No GUI. Just a blinking cursor. But man, I felt like Tony Stark for a moment.

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🧠 Lessons I Learned (The Hard-ish Way)

• Your .pem file is everything – don’t delete it thinking it's just a random file.

• Avoid 0.0.0.0/0 in Security Groups unless you're just testing something quick.

• Use a fixed IP (Elastic IP) if you’re going to need to access it often.

• Always shut down or terminate EC2s you don’t need—AWS can get expensive real quick 💸

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✨ From Confusion to Confidence

When I first saw EC2 and all its settings, I felt overwhelmed. But the more I played with it, the more it started to make sense.

So if you're reading this and thinking,

“Bro, this is too much,”
I promise—it gets easier.

Just take it step by step. One config at a time.

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🏁 What's Next?

Now that we’ve set up a secure EC2 instance, it’s time to make it do something.
Next up, I’m going to show how I installed a web server (Apache/Nginx) and hosted my first site from EC2. It’s gonna be 🔥

Thanks for reading. If you found this helpful, let’s connect! Or just drop a comment—always happy to help a fellow cloud warrior 💪