Amazon S3 is a great new service from Amazon offering very cheap, very reliable, very scalable Internet storage. It is not an end-user facility, but a back-end service that developers can build on. However, Interarchy supports direct access to it, and you can make the files on there publicly readable, and taken together, that means you can have your website hosted there for next to nothing. Throw in a few Google ads, and your personal website could easily be revenue positive.
Rather than write a blog entry about how to do this, I figured I would just go ahead and make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 showing how to make a simple website hosted by Amazon S3 using Interarchy. Very recursive.
The site is called How Do I Make It, and is set up to allow other tutorials to be added in later, but really the site‘s main purpose is to demonstrate hosting a website on Amazon S3, so you can read the article directly.
Posted Tuesday, August 1, 2006. Permalink. 4 Comments.
No, Amazon S3 is a storage service only, it is not a web server like Apache. It does not support .htaccess (It does support access control, but not like this), nor PHP or includes or anything at all like that. It only supports raw files, no processing.
However, it could be used to host the unprocessed parts of a web site (eg CSS files, Images, downloadables, etc) so as to remove the bulk of the bandwidth from your web server and leave it free to process perl or PHP or whatever.
Posted Friday, August 4, 2006 01:32 AM by Peter N Lewis.
Basically anything is a candidate that takes up relatively much storage space, doesn't need to be processed and gets downloaded a lot. For instance, I publish my photo albums on my site. Downloading the images was slow because of the slow uplink and it also saturated my ADSL.
What I did after reading Peter's article was a) make a CNAME for images.artharg.nl to s3.amazonaws.com (it doesn't need to be www.something.com) b) create an Amazon account and sign up for S3 c) upload all photo files to a directory called "/images.artharg.nl/" on S3 d) adjust some XML in my site templates to look for images at http://images.artharg.nl/ instead of http://www.artharg.nl/TravelAlbums/
Hey presto! Apart from the actual uploads it's less than 15 minutes work. Now the main content comes from my own web server, which includes some Cocoon stuff, some XML processing etc. and the big stuff comes from S3. People won't notice unless they specifically look for it. But take a look at a picture page and its source and you'll see.
Cool service from Amazon and a big happy jay! for Interarchy and Stairways!
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 01:55 PM by Arthur van der Harg.
Does anyone know if a website hosted on Amazon S3 will come up in Google searches?
-->I have a domain registered with Yahoo that is forwarding to my Amazon S3 address (www.mishamazor.com forwards to http://mishamazor.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)
Thanks,
Misha
Posted Saturday, April 5, 2008 09:22 AM by Misha.
None yet.
Do you know if .htaccess files are supported? And, if so, couldn't one be used to automatically add the "www" and "index.html" (or whatnot) whenever someone accessed the website? Also, I wonder if PHP is supported...
Posted Thursday, August 3, 2006 07:18 PM by Spencer.