Topher's AWS Blog

S3 Static Blog Website

TL;DR: Hosting this blog through a secure connection to CloudFront that points to an S3 static website.

Key Takeaways

• HTTPS is not possible for static websites hosted on S3. HTTPS for static S3 websites is only possible through certificates on a CloudFront distribution that points to the S3 bucket.
• When hosting S3 websites, the bucket name must match the domain name. For this project to work, both the bucket name and domain needed to be "tophersawsblog.com".
• Registering a domain with Route 53 is overall surprisingly cheap and only ran me 13 dollars for a year to claim which made it hard to even consider a 3rd party register like GoDaddy or another similar competitor.

Project Description

The goal of this was to get something a little more formal in terms of showcasing AWS projects and skills. While it is relatively easy to stand up a static site in S3 by default, this provided additional steps to providing a secure https connection. Despite what it lacks in style, the functionality and what it content outweigh it in my mind and overall do enjoy maintaining it and coming up with new ideas on how to make it more pleasing to the eye.


The things I struggled with here is remembering to switch the records so it doesn't point to the S3 bucket and instead points to the CloudFront Distribution. My goal is to further secure this by implementing origin access control but last time I tried to perform this I ran into issues of my site not being accessible.