Amazon is now offering hosting for static Web sites through S3. It makes it possible now for people with blogs and static Web sites to get the power of Amazon Web Services performance.
Its first customer? Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.
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Here’s how Amazon’s Jeff Baar explained the new feature that Vogels is using.
Prior to today, you could host your pictures and video on Amazon S3. But hosting a static Web site wasn’t realistic as the CNAME to the site resolved to the S3 bucket.
A site hosted on S3 would lead the visitor to the roots of S3 bucket, which would display the data in XML format. Instead, customers would host their site on Amazon EC2.
Now, an S3 bucket can be accessed as a Web site. Visitors accessing root of the Web site bucket receive a root document. If an error occurs, the visitor receives an HTML error document instead of an XML error message.
Vogels:
Since a few days ago this weblog serves 100% of its content directly out of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) without the need for a web server to be involved. Because my blog is almost completely static content I wanted to run in this very simple configuration since the launch of Amazon S3. It would allow the blog to be powered by the incredible scale and reliability of Amazon S3 with a minimum of effort from my side. I know of several other customers who had asked for this greatly simplifying feature as well. I had held out implementing an alternative to my simple blog server that had been running at a traditional hosting site for many years until this preferred simple solution became available: today marks that day and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Vogel says there are still aspects of the blog that he runs separately such as editing posts, managing comments and serve search. He says those things can be run out of a single Amazon EC2 instance.
Easy for the end-user? Let’s just say it’s easier but really this is for the developer who is familiar with the AWS console and the AWD SDKs.
Vogels:
You will also need to set access control to make sure that your content is publicly accessible. I have used a bucket policy to make all documents world readable, but you could create one that restricts it to referrers, network address range, time of day, etc. I can now turn on Amazon Cloudfront, the content delivery service, with one simple click, whenever needed.
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