Ok so I created an ubuntu instance from AWS and downloaded LAMP on it as you would in a regular Ubuntu OS. When I try to connect to the db from my php script it's rejecting the connection. saying "Connection failed: Connection refused". So I guess my question is this: Does amazon not allow you to connect to a db without using their RDS database service or am I putting something wrong here? (I've hidden some of the data for security purposes, the ... are numbers of my instance). When I put "ec2-34-...-..-64.compute-1.amazonaws.com" into the browser the apache message comes up so I don't see why this is not working as a server name?
$servername = "ec2-34-...-..-64.compute-1.amazonaws.com";
$username = "root";
$password = “hidden";
$dbname = "questions87";
// Create connection
$conn = mysqli_connect($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
// Check connection
if (!$conn) {
die("Connection failed: " . mysqli_connect_error());
}