Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as Web Hosting
I just want to quickly mention here how I host this blog. It is all just static HTML files, generated by Jekyll and being served by our cloud computing big brother, Amazon with their disk on the cloud service, S3. Amazon S3 is mainly used as a place to store and backup files and also used by many startups as a simple Content Delivery Network (CDN) for their static files.
If your website or blog is just a bunch of static files, like my blog here, you can easily host it on Amazon S3. The great thing is that you don’t have to pay if there isn’t much data and traffic to your site. It is almost free, as in beer. And since its hosted on Amazon S3, it is probably going to be more reliable and better performing than your average web hosting. So no problem even if you get the Slashdot effect (or Digg/Reddit/whatever-suits-your-fancy)!
All you have to do is just a few configurations on your Amazon S3. The main configuration is well documented by Amazon: Customizing Amazon S3 URLs with CNAMEs
The brief overview:
- Create a bucket to put your files
- The bucket name should match exactly your domain name, e.g. for my website, it will be www.cheeming.com
- The files in that bucket should be shared as public, since its meant for public consumption
- Setup your Domain Name System (DNS) settings to add a new CNAME to point to the Amazon S3 endpoint for the new bucket
So go ahead and create your new website on Amazon S3!
