How Do I Make It:…
An Amazon S3 Hosted Website using Interarchy
This page describes how to use Interarchy to create an Amazon S3 hosted website.
Register your Domain Name
The hard part is registering your domain name and pointing it at Amazon S3’s servers. I used GoDaddy.com to register this domain name (howdoimakeit.info). No extra services are required (except maybe privacy).
Then I set www.howdoimakeit.info to CNAME to s3.amazonaws.com as follows:
- In the Manage Domains section, switch the Name Server settings to the Default Hosting Name Servers.
- Click on the domain and open the Total DNS Control panel near the bottom.
- Click on Total DNS Control and MX Records.
- Click on Launch the DNS Control Manager.
- Click on Launch the DNS Control Manager.
- Edit www and point it at s3.amazonaws.com.
- You can delete all the rest of the entries.
- Sign out and log out of GoDaddy.
The change will take 24-48 hours, so do not be allarmed if your domain name still points to the GoDaddy parked “Comming Soon” page for some time after you make this change.
Create am Amazon S3 account
If you do not already have one, go to Amazon S3 and click “Sign Up For Web Service” and create your account. You will need to Amazon S3 Access Key ID and Secret Access Key .
Set up a Net Disk
Now the easy part. Launch Interarchy and select File -> Connect to Server. Select the Amazon S3 protocol, the New Net Disk action, and type in /www.YOURDOMAINNAME/ as the path (eg /www.howdoimakeit.info/). Enter your Amazon S3 Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Change the Mirror Mode to Mirror Upload and click New in the toolbar.
Interarchy will create the bucket corresponding to your domain name, and open a folder in the Finder for you. Now, since you want all the uploaded files to be publicly readable, in Interarchy choose Listing -> Upload Permissions, and then set the Protocol to Amazon S3, the server to s3.amazonaws.com, the path to /www.YOURDOMAINNAME/, your permissions to Read & Write, and Others to Public Read.
Create your website
Now, all you need to do is create an index.html file there, Interarchy will mirror it to Amazon S3, and your website will be live. I used StyleMaster to create an initial site based on a template by Andreas Viklund and then started adding this content. As I added it, Interarchy dutifully uploaded it. One the Domain Name changes had gone through, I could see my site taking shape as I added to it.
Unresolved Issues
Amazon S3 is not really designed to be a web server, so it will not do some of the things you might expect. Particularly, while your URL of http://www.howdoimakeit.info/index.html" will work, URLs with host name “howdoimakeit.info” and or with paths like http://www.howdoimakeit.info/index.html or http://www.howdoimakeit.info will not work.