Moving Codeigniter Project to Amazon EC2, htaccess and ModRewrite Problems
To answer my own question...
I wound up changing the Apache file /etc/apache/sites-available/default from AllowOverRide = None to AllowOverRide = All.
have you also tried
RewriteBase /
or RewriteBase /simple/
or along those lines?
in my dealings on servers i've used, i've never had to put the domain into the rewrite base. Just the folders