I have found the culprit. When you specify the availability zone especially 1-b it is taking an inordinate amount of time (this may be needed for bandwidth and data transfer savings reasons). But if you are in an emergency where cost is not as much of an issue, then leaving the availability zone with No Preference will spawn an instance in US-East within 4-5 minutes (either from a community ami or your own custom ami). I have tested and confirmed this.
Thanks for this info! This is a lot of software. Is it better to then build the stack one needs on top of the basic OS and then store it in S3 (cheaper than EBS) as your custom AMI and fire that up as needed?
From a pricing standpoint I have found Rackspace to be more flexible at the lower end 256MB slice but once you start going higher toward 1.5GB RAM it gets more pricier than Amazon. I am guessing you were referring to RackSpace Cloud. The pure Rackspace solution is very pricy compared to AWS.
Look at this step by step installation process of LAMP on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 64 bit server. It also includes installation of Ubuntu Uncomplicated Firewall for the server and the installation of phpMyAdmin.