Hosting a static site on aws (S3 and Route 53)

This site was for a very short period of time hosted on aws. Being curious about the cloud I decided to give a try.

I almost give up a couple of times but the problem was not aws, it was me. I did not want to get out of my comfort zone! I was telling me that maybe I will try again Linode which is more or less a replica of my own computer.

Main steps:

• I register my domain “defnx.org” using google domains. You can use any register you like, including aws itself (which it may facilitate the whole process, not sure about that).

• I sign up on aws. I am going to need two of them: S3 and Route 53.

• This is a static site, so I do not need any kind of computation or interpreter like PHP. So I just put my files on a disk space, called “Bucket” by Amazon and I point my domain towards the bucket. My files have no extension, so I create a content-type tag text/html when uploading them.

• Route 53 is used to administrate DNS records. I create a “Hosted zone” within this service.

• The name of the bucket and the name of the hosted zone must be identical.

• I configure the bucket to host an static site and I define the index file. Pretty straight forward. I add a bucket policy to make the bucket public and allow people to visit my site.

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Sid": "AddPerm",
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Principal": "*",
          "Action": "s3:GetObject",
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::defnx.org/*"
        }
      ]
  }
  

• I create a hosted zone (service Route 53). The hosted zone creates by default 4 records NS (name server). My domain register is google, so I need to sign in on google domains console and configure these 4 name servers as the dns servers instead of google’s.

• I create a new record set, I choose “Alias” and the select list automatically proposes the bucket (if I correctly use the same name for the bucket and the hosted zone).

• I type http://defnx.org and it works fine.

• I expect very little traffic, so I hope It costs almost nothing.