Hosting A Static Site On Amazon S3

Preface

Hosting a static site is preferred by many developers because it gives you a maximum of control at a minimum of maintenance. While there are other tools available Jekyll became something like a reference implementation, especially under Ruby developers. Since Jekyll's creator, Tom Preston Werner, also founded Github it is not surprising that Github is providing a service to autogenerate and host your static site as soon as you push it.

Now, that sounds like perfect all around. It is. As long as you are not using custom generators or converters with Jekyll everything is good. If you do however you'll quickly notice that Github disabled custom Ruby code to keep everything secure.

Since the requirements for hosting a static site are nearly non-existent you can easily move it onto any Server.

I decided for Amazon S3 because it's widely used, reliable and cheap.

Static Site Generators

While there are quite a lot. Jekyll is used by most people. When I chose Jekyll it was mostly because of it's active community and the fact that it is developed and used heavily by Github. Before I settled on Jekyll I gave nanoc a try. I don't exactly remember why I ditched nanoc but in the end Jekyll feels lighter and I also prefer Liquid Markup over ERB Syntax.

Setting Up Amazon S3

Comparing Github's free hosting with Amazon S3 is somewhat unfair since you got to pay for S3 storage and bandwith. Doing the math however you'll quickly notice that the price for hosting your static site on S3 is low. With a complete page size of 100M and traffic of 10G you would not pay more than 2$.

After creating a new bucket in your S3 instance there are only a few steps you need to do in order to have a proper static site hosted by S3.

Important: When creating your bucket make sure that it has the same name as the domain name you want to use for your static site (ex. www.martinklepsch.org). This domain has to have some subdomain.

Step 1: Enable S3's website feature by enabling it in the properties pane of your bucket.

Step 2: Set a bucket policy that basically allows everyone to view the contents of your bucket.

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

Step 3: Upload your static website to S3. You can either do that manually by using the AWS Management Console or you can automate the process by writing some small programm. There are S3 libraries for many programming languages. I built a small rake task that does the job.

If you are experiencing problems with the setup of S3 I recommend the official AWS documentation.

Naked Domain Name Fowarding

DNS does not allow to set the whats apparently called "zone apex" ("example.com") to be a CNAME for another domain like www.example.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Therefore you need to redirect all requests going to your domain without www to you domain with www (example.com to www.example.com). Read more.

You can either do this by using your domain registrars control panel or by using a service like wwwizer. I did it with Gandi's control panel and it works fine.