Static Website Hosting on Amazon S3

Setting up a static site on Amazon S3 is relatively simple and very cheap. Here are the steps on how to set up the site.

1. Sign up at http://aws.amazon.com/ and choose the basic (free) plan. Click ‘Launch Management Console’.

2. Click S3 and create a new bucket. Name the bucket your domain name, e.g. “example.com”.

3. Select the ‘Properties’ for your newly created bucket and then click on ‘Static Website Hosting’. Select ‘Enable website hosting’, enter index.html for the index document, and enter 404.html for the error document. Make sure to save the changes.

4. Double click on the newly created bucket. Upload the relevant files for the root domain and create folders for your other files to be uploaded to.

5. Select all files and folders, then click ‘Actions’ and click ‘Make Public’. Another way to make files public is by adding a bucket policy (See Properties -> Permissions):

   {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Id": "My Policies",
    "Statement": [
      {
        "Sid": "Allow Global Access",
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Principal": {
          "AWS": "*"
        },
        "Action": "s3:GetObject",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::example.com/*"
      }
    ]
   }
   

6. The files will now be accessible at an address similar to http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/example.com/index.html and http://example.com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/. You need to edit your domain’s DNS settings (probably at your registar) by creating a CNAME record with the following information:

   Name: example.com
   Type: CNAME
   Record: example.com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com
   

   Make sure www.example.com will behave as expected.

7. Test and make sure everything is working!

Also check out the official AWS guide here (2023): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html

Pricing

The estimated cost for

• 1GB Standard Storage
• 10,000 PUT/COPY/POST/LIST Requests
• 10,000 GET and Other Requests
• 1GB Data Transfer Out
• 1GB Data Transfer In

is only $0.09 per month ($1.08 per year). You can check other costs at http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html.