Setting up an FTP server on Amazon EC2 is pretty easy. In this example, we'll be setting up vsftp on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5, but these instructions will apply with minor modification to most any other Linux platform.
Following the Joomla documentation for enabling Search Engine Friendly URLs and Apache mod_rewrite results in the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error when used on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Fortunately, getting it to work takes only a minute or two once you know the quirks. Here's how: