AWS Ubuntu Instance - User rights

Solution 1:

In the specific case of files for a web server, it's ok to simply give ownership of that directory to the ubuntu user.

 sudo chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu /var/www

Then you can drop files there easily.

You might also find some useful information about the EC2 user setup on Ubuntu in this article I wrote a while back:

Using sudo, ssh, rsync on the Official Ubuntu Images for EC2
http://alestic.com/2009/04/ubuntu-ec2-sudo-ssh-rsync