This is a collection of tips and tricks I learnt whilst setting up a static site hosted on Amazon S3 lately for one of my apps. Now, in all the instructions, make sure you replace ‘mywebsite.com’ wherever you see it with your applicable domain of course :)
Buy your domain
First buy your domain (not hosting). This should cost $10/year roughly. People recommend godaddy, but i went with unlimited-space because they didn’t charge extra for WHOIS privacy. However, they don’t supply DNS hosting, so you have to set that up separately.
DNS
Go to zerigodns.com and grab an account. Go into the DNS management and create a new domain: mywebsite.com.
In this domain, create two hosts, one with an empty subdomain, and one with a ‘www’ subdomain. The setup for these two entries should be as follows:
mywebsite.com
Type: A
174.129.25.170
www.mywebsite.com
Type: CNAME
www.mywebsite.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
The IP address against the ‘A’ entry is used so that anyone who forgets the ‘www’ gets send to wwwizer (a free service that requires no account), who will forward them to the ‘www.mywebsite.com’ which will properly forward them to S3.
Unless you bought your domain from someone who packages it with DNS hosting, you’ll need to connect your domain registrar with zerigo. You’ll have to go to your domain registrar (ie unlimited-space in my case) and set your nameservers to:
a.ns.zerigo.net
b.ns.zerigo.net
c.ns.zerigo.net
d.ns.zerigo.net
e.ns.zerigo.net
S3
In the AWS S3 console, make a new bucket called ‘www.mywebsite.com’. Right click > Properties on this bucket, and set up the following:
Bucket policy
In the ‘Permissions’ tab, edit the bucket policy to make it publicly readable. Set the bucket policy as per on this blog on ariejan.net, as follows:
{
"Version":"2008-10-17",
"Statement":[{
"Sid":"AllowPublicRead",
"Effect":"Allow",
"Principal": {
"AWS": "*"
},
"Action":["s3:GetObject"],
"Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::www.mywebsite.com/*"
]
}
]
}
Make sure you replace the ‘www.mywebsite.com’ above to match your s3 bucket name.
Website
In the website tab of the bucket properties, select ‘enabled’, put in index.html as your index document, and `error.html`` as your error document.
You will see the endpoint in this tab as well. It should look like www.mywebsite.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Just double check that it’s the same as the CNAME entry you made in your DNS settings.
That should be it! You’ve now got a static website for a fraction of the price of typical hosting. My rough calculations indicate that this should cost me ~$2 a year. Brilliant.
