Amazon S3 - Hosting Entire Websites

Hosting Entire Websites

As of February 18, 2011, Amazon S3 provides options to host static websites with Index document support and error document support. This support was added as a result of user requests dating at least to 2006. For example, suppose that Amazon S3 was configured with CNAME records to host http://subdomain.example.com/. In the past, a visitor to this URL would find only an XML-formatted list of objects instead of a general landing page (e.g., index.html) to accommodate casual visitors. Now, however, websites hosted on S3 may designate a default page to display, and another page to display in the event of a partially invalid URL. However, the current domain registration infrastructure only allows a subdomain to be hosted this way, not a second level domain. That is, subdomain.example.com can be hosted, but not example.com. One may use an A record pointing to the S3 server, but this method is not documented by Amazon.