Amazon EC2 Setup and Connection

CLOUD NINE
First, you will need to sign up for Amazon EC2 (I am currently in the Free tier).
Next, follow these directions to launch a cloud OS so that we can start serving up webpages! I chose Ubuntu 12.10 64bit, so these instructions apply for that instance type, though they may work for other types

To ssh to the newly launched instance, find the public DNS from the Amazon EC2 management page, then use these commands:
chmod 600 <keyname>.pem
ssh -i <keyname>.pem -l ubuntu <public DNS name>

Now we are in! Time to do some quick security setup, using the instructions found here. The only liberties I have taken are setting the ufw firewall rules to 22 allow, and not setting IP rules or allowed users for ssh (since we have set it to key only access).

FLASK OF WHITE LIGHTNING
We need to get python-pip and python-virtualenv packages. Do this by running sudo apt-get install python-{pip,virtualenv}. virtualenv isolates at special instance of python from everything else, so packages won't interfere with your main python install.

Running virtualenv venv; source venv/bin/activate should put you into the virtual environment, we can install flask here by running sudo venv/bin/pip install flask . For an easy setup of flask with authentication, SQLAlchemy, and twitter bootstrap, thanks to esbullington, we can run the following commands

sudo apt-get install python-dev libpq-dev
git clone git://github.com/esbullington/flask-bootstrap.git
sudo venv/bin/pip install -r flask-bootstrap/requirements.txt

To finish launching our app, we need to create a postgreSQL database for the application to connect to. The basic instructions list the following steps:
sudo apt-get install postgreql
sudo -u postgres psql postgres
    \password postgres
sudo -u postgres createuser <username>  
sudo -u postgres psql 
    create databse <dbname> with owner <username>
sudo -u postgres psql
    \password <username>

To login to the database, use psql -d <dbname> -U <username> -h localhost.

Go into flask-boostrap, and adjust the app.cfg and app.py settings.

app.cfg
Change the postgresql settings to
'postgresql://<username>:<password>@127.0.0.1/<dbname>'

app.py
Change the app.run line so that we bind to port 80 and allow connections from any external IP
app.run(debug=True,host='0.0.0.0',port=80)

To run this script, do
nohup sudo venv/bin/python flask-bootstrap/app.py &

Now the next step is figuring out how to link this server to a real deal domain name!