Considerations

This tutorial will assume that you are using a free tier account. These accounts come with a set amount of credits and will be closed after 6 months if credits don't run out beforehand, so your application won't be up permanently. Hosting an application on AWS is around $10-20 a month once free tier expires on an EC2 instance with the configuration we will be selecting in EC2 creation, so if you would like to pay to keep it up then that's entirely your choice. But even if you don't want to, getting hands-on experience with AWS is so valuable since it is a tool used by many industry leaders in tech and you will likely be using it in your career.

There are also so many ways to deploy a full-stack application on AWS, including Amazon ECS (elastic container service), EKS (elastic kubernetes service), App Runner (fully managed and simplest, but core server concepts hidden), or Lightsail containers. This tutorial will use EC2 because it provides a high level of customization which will help you gain a better understanding of what's happening under the hood.