Routing traffic to a website that is hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket - Amazon Route 53
PrerequisitesConfiguring Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an S3 Bucket

Routing traffic to a website that is hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides secure, durable, highly scalable cloud storage. You can configure an S3 bucket to host a static website that can include webpages and client-side scripts. (S3 doesn't support server-side scripting.)

To route domain traffic to an S3 bucket, use Amazon Route 53 to create an alias record that points to your bucket. An alias record is a Route 53 extension to DNS. It's similar to a CNAME record, except you can create an alias record both for the root domain, such as example.com, and for subdomains, such as www.example.com. You can create CNAME records only for subdomains.

Note

Route 53 doesn't charge for alias queries to S3 buckets or other AWS resources.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need the following. If you're new to Amazon Route 53 or S3, see Getting started with Amazon Route 53, which guides you through the entire process, including registering a domain name, and creating and configuring an S3 bucket.

  • An S3 bucket that's configured to host a static website.

    For more information, see Configure a bucket for website hosting in the Amazon Simple Storage Service User Guide.

    Important

    The bucket must have the same name as your domain or subdomain. For example, if you want to use the subdomain acme.example.com, the name of the bucket must be acme.example.com.

    You can route traffic for a domain and its subdomains, such as example.com and www.example.com, to a single bucket. Create a bucket for the domain and each subdomain, and configure all but one of the buckets to redirect traffic to the remaining bucket. For more information, see Getting started with Amazon Route 53.

    Note

    An S3 bucket that's configured as a website endpoint doesn't support SSL/TLS, so you need to route traffic to the CloudFront distribution and use the S3 bucket as the origin for the distribution.

    For instructions on how to create a CloudFront distribution, see Create a CloudFront distribution and Configuring alternate domain names and HTTPS in the CloudFront User Guide in addition to Routing traffic to an Amazon CloudFront distribution by using your domain name.

  • A registered domain name. You can use Route 53 as your domain registrar, or you can use a different registrar.

  • Route 53 as the DNS service for the domain. If you register your domain name by using Route 53, we automatically configure Route 53 as the DNS service for the domain.

    For information about using Route 53 as the DNS service provider for your domain, see Making Amazon Route 53 the DNS service for an existing domain.

Configuring Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an S3 Bucket

To configure Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to an S3 bucket that is configured to host a static website, perform the following procedure.

To route traffic to an S3 bucket

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Route 53 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Hosted zones.

  3. Choose the name of the hosted zone that has the domain name that you want to use to route traffic to your S3 bucket.

  4. Choose Create record.

  5. Specify the following values:

    Routing policy

    Choose the applicable routing policy. For more information, see Choosing a routing policy.

    Record name

    Enter the domain name that you want to use to route traffic to your S3 bucket. The default value is the name of the hosted zone.

    For example, if the name of the hosted zone is example.com and you want to use acme.example.com to route traffic to your bucket, enter acme.

    Alias

    If you are using the Quick create record creation method, turn on Alias.

    Value/Route traffic to

    Choose Alias to S3 website endpoint, then choose the Region that the endpoint is from.

    Choose the bucket that has the same name that you specified for Record name.

    The list includes a bucket only if the bucket meets the following requirements:

    • The name of the bucket is the same as the name of the record that you're creating.

    • The bucket is configured as a website endpoint.

    • The bucket was created by the current AWS account.

      If you created the bucket using a different AWS account, enter the name of the Region that you created your S3 bucket in. For the correct format for the Region name, see the Website endpoint column in the table Amazon S3 website endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.

    Record type

    Choose A – IPv4 address.

    Evaluate target health

    Accept the default value of Yes.

  6. Choose Create records.

    Changes generally propagate to all Route 53 servers within 60 seconds. When propagation is done, you'll be able to route traffic to your S3 bucket by using the name of the alias record that you created in this procedure.