I've got a follow up post that shows how to use upstart instead of init to manage supervisor http://cuppster.com/2011/05/18/using-supervisor-with-upstart

People were having issues with the init script gist... upstart simplifies things quite a bit.

I've used this recipe for a couple sites of mine, including the blog itself. The ups and downs of beta features of other node.js hosting providers was becoming a hindrance so I decided to roll my own.

would be interesting to know what features node hoster kept changing? Only thing I have so far is some cough node hosts don't send out enough invites for some of us to get

Great guide, thanks.

One issue I've run into trying to push from my windows 7 machine to my instance is a "Permission denied(publickey)" error, which I assume is due to a missing SSH key in git for my ec2 instance? Does anyone know how to tell the ec2 alias to use my instance private key when connecting?

If you're having issues with ssh picking up your keys, you can always call it out explicitly: ssh -i path/to/key.pem ec2-user@blah.amazonaws.com

if you're using an ubuntu image, it's going to be the ubuntu user: ssh -i path/to/key.pem ubuntu@blah.amazonaws.com

Spent too much time figuring that out the hardway...

And the kicker: The AMI you suggest qualifies as free for a year with a new AWS account. Free hosting for a year to play around with Node. Thanks a lot!

Yes it does, but I'm having so much fun deploying these things, I've created more than one... =)

The last time I checked I remember all the Ubuntu images were too big to be completely free. They required more storage than the free tier allowed. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

The AMI is 8GB. The free, micro instance provides 10GB as described here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/.

Great step-by-step walkthrough that will help people not familiar with all the tools. Thanks for taking the time to write this up!

Very handy guide