How to point a domain to serve static site from Amazon S3? (not sub-domain)

Question

I see several people describing how to do this for a custom domain with sub-domain but no one talking about how to do it without one.

Example: Setting foobar.com and w

Answer 1

For historical reasons any URL needs to resolve to a subdomain, which you already know how to handle: Create a CNAME record with your DNS provider, pointing www to your S3-hosted subdomain. There are details to get right, described nicely elsewhere.

You nevertheless want to support users who, charmed that their browsers will autocomplete http:// and .com and such, want to type a naked domain domain.com, and have it automatically complete to your default subdomain such as www.domain.com.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use www as your default subdomain, and point your DNS provider's A record at wwwizer.com (174.129.25.170). They automatically redirect any naked domain to the same domain with www in front.

You get fastest turnaround on development, and your visitors get fastest DNS resolution, if you use Amazon Route 53 to provide your DNS services. Route 53 can point its A records to wwwizer.com. However, you may want to create a micro Amazon EC2 instance, and start programming it. In the '50s everyone rebuilt their own cars. In the '80s everyone pushed a shopping cart down the aisle at Fry's, and built their own computer. Now, you want to be able to build your own computer in the cloud, for many reasons you will discover with time, and Amazon EC2 is best choice. For now, your cloud computer will simply handle naked domains for you. Later, email, generating the static site, ...

Install the Apache web server (the A in LAMP; a LAMP server will do the trick), and configure a virtual host for each of your domains. Then point an elastic IP address at your EC2 instance, and update Route 53 to have your A record point to this elastic IP address. Amazon doesn't support having multiple elastic IPs pointing to the same EC2 instance, but you can provide the same elastic IP to multiple domain A records, and have Apache resolve this within your EC2 instance.

This takes some fiddling and experimenting, as there's lots of conflicting advice on the details. I used the ami-ad36fbc4 instance image (US East, 64 bit EBS-backed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), as I'm familiar with Ubuntu, there's plenty of online help with Ubuntu, and this image will be supported for years. I edited /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to have the contents

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName first.net
Redirect permanent / http://www.first.net/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName second.net
Redirect permanent / http://www.second.net/
</VirtualHost>

then checked for errors using

sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl configtest

then restarted the Apache server using

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apache is standard across Linux flavors, but the details such as file locations may vary, e.g./etc/apache2/httpd.conf could be /etc/httpd.conf. For example, it might be necessary put a Listen 80 in httpd.conf, but Apache throws an error if that command was already somewhere else. So read web instructions with a grain of salt, and be prepared to Google any error messages.

As I'd already been using Amazon Route 53 for days to point to wwwizer.com, this worked immediately once I updated Route 53 to point to my elastic IP. Before switching to Route 53, each change took days for me to verify, as the information propagated across the web. Once everyone knows to look to Amazon, Amazon can propagate its internal changes much more quickly.

Answer 2

Since this question was asked things have changed. It is now possible to host your site on S3 with a root domain.

Instead of just having one bucket named "www.yourserver.com", you have to create another bucket with the nude (root) domain name, e.g. "yourserver.com".

After that you will have to use Amazon's DNS service Route 53. Create an A record for the nude domain and a CNAME for the "www" hostname.

Note that you will need to move the domain management of your domain to Amazon Route 53 completely.

See for the detailled walk-through here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html

Answer 3

Unfortunately you can not point foobar.com to an Amazon S3 bucket and the reason for this has to do with how DNS works.

DNS does not allow the root of a domain (called zone apex) to point to another DNS name (you can not have foobar.com set up as a CNAME / only subdomain.foobar.com can be a CNAME)