Hey Allen. Sorry you had a hard time with your upgrade previously. Those instructions are the correct instructions. I'm going to add some notes today about potential problems people run into.
However, if you make a backup of the htdocs folder (or install folder if a manual install) you can always revert back if things do not go smoothly.
I would recommend having a dev/test instance running that you can try out the upgrade procedure on before doing it in production.
In Amazon AWS, you should be able to actually deploy a copy of your existing production instance for this.