-->
Key takeaways:
The primary task for any website owner is to decide where to host the website (static or dynamic). There are two options available for this. First, buy any virtual server, or second, consult a popular web hosting company. The latter is both economical and convenient to use.
Just pay what the company is asking for hosting, and relax. Except for these two, many of the website owners don’t know about the third way, i.e. AWS S3 hosting. Here, AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It’s more helpful and worth using if your website is static. So, in this blog, I will disclose everything about hosting a static website over AWS S3. So, let’s start.
AWS S3 is suitable for only static websites. A website is static if it’s simple, and nothing is happening at the back end. This is because AWS S3 doesn’t support server-side components like PHP, JSP, or ASP.NET. An example of a static site is a business site where the user will only find the contact information.
The following are the key benefits of using AWS S3 for your website hosting. These are-
So, due to these benefits among many others, it’s a great deal to host with AWS S3.
Although there are not such many strange requirements to host your website on AWS S3, some mandatory ones are:
So, these are the basic requirements for hosting your static website on AWS S3. Now, it’s the right time to discover the hosting process on AWS S3.
In this section, I will show you how to host a simple HTML website on AWS S3. So, let’s get started!
First, create an S3 bucket. It is where you will put all your files and website. Name the bucket after your domain name. After naming, it’s time to configure the bucket. It is advisable to turn on the object versioning. It is useful in case you wish to restore any previous image or file.
Then, it’s time to unlock the public ACLs for objects. It is important to do so because only then your site will go publicly visible. As the bucket is ready, you can now put your files into it. Again, make sure that the files you upload are made public and not private. In the next step, you will have the option to select the storage class. For now, leave it to Standard.
After creating a bucket, it’s the right time to enable website hosting. So, go to your bucket’s properties. There, you will find this option, static website hosting. Enable it. Now, enter the name of your website’s “core” file. Usually, it is “index.html”. If you have a file to be shown in the case of an error, just define it also in the bucket.
Further, it’s worth it to save the endpoint displayed above at this point. This is an important step while hosting the website. If you’ve done all the above steps correctly, your website will appear as soon as you enter the endpoint into the browser.
After the above two steps, your website must go online (if all the steps go correct at your end). But you won’t be entering a big URL to access your site on the browser. Right? If you want to access your site using its domain name, it is important to set up its DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name System.
You can use Cloudflare to add and manage the records. For this, do the below-mentioned steps.
Now, just wait for the DNS records to get active. Once done, you can access your website on the browser by entering its domain name. With this, you have enabled the AWS S3 hosting for your website.
So, this concludes the post. Today, if you own a static website, then hosting it over AWS S3 is an ideal choice. It offers various benefits listed above. Further, going by the trend, most of the static websites in the coming future will be posted here only. So, what are you waiting for? Try AWS S3 today.