Creating an Amazon AWS S3 Static Website

OK this is going to be a fairly short and simple post, but I want to take you through the steps as it will lead nicely into my follow up post. Basically what we’re going to do is use Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 to host our static website. This is a great feature of AWS whereby their cloud storage services can be used to host a website.

1. Create a bucket - Sign Up for AWS and goto the console. Then click the S3 tab at the top and click “Create Bucket” underneath the tab. Buckets are amazon’s storage containers, they hold all your files. You’ll want to choose a region closest to where your users will be. Your bucket name has to be unique, and obviously useful to you, in my next post I’ll talk more about how you need to link it to your domain name if you decide to use a custom domain for your bucket.

2. Upload your files - Click on your bucket and upload your files. CSS, HTML, Images etc. I like to have a separate bucket for my images and or you can use AWS CDN services, but that’s another story.

3. Setup the bucket as a website - Click on your bucket and click properties. Goto the website tab and click Enabled and set the index document to your index.htm file or whatever. Click save.

4. Set bucket permissions - Click the permissions tab and click “Add bucket Policy” copy the following text, replacing the name of your bucket with the words mybucketname, then click save.

{
 "Version":"2008-10-17",
 "Statement":[{
    "Sid":"PublicReadForGetBucketObjects",
       "Effect":"Allow",
      "Principal": {
           "AWS": "*"
        },
     "Action":["s3:GetObject"],
     "Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::mybucketname:/*"
     ]
   }
 ]
}



That’s it, your URL should be something like:
http://mybucketname.s3-website-region.amazonaws.com