Guide to Shiny apps with Shiny Server on Amazon EC2

Preface: posting this for archive purposes only. This was the first of its kind and has been succeeded by better guides.

Introduction

I am writing this guide because this guide did not exist when I decided to put my 2010 US Census Shiny App on Amazon’s servers. Surely I can’t be the only one who’s never had any experience with EC2 (or SSH or vi, for that matter).