Host Static Websites With Amazon S3

Amazon S3, the inexpensive storage service, now can be used to host entire static websites. Though the service will accept any kind of file, which makes it great for keeping large or frequently-accessed data (podcasts, software downloads, JavaScript widgets, etc.) off your server, until recently it didn’t support index files. You could point a domain to an S3 bucket and upload HTML files, but visitors would get an automatically-generated listing of files instead of your index.html content. That has now changed. Amazon now allows you to setup custom root and error documents.

To get started, open the Amazon S3 Management Console, and follow these simple steps:

1) Right-click on your Amazon S3 bucket and open the Properties pane
2) Configure your root and error documents in the Website tab
3) Click Save

It seems like a good way to throw up a quick traffic-resistant website, though I imagine it could get expensive pretty quickly if it were, say, submitted to Reddit.