Creating a static website on AWS

For this project, I wanted to demonstrate my skills in using AWS and its console as well as my understanding of the cloud and infrastructure.

A website is arguably one of the most important things when it comes to a business. Also showcasing your skills, hence this website! So you want to make sure you are hosting the website properly and in a safe environment. What better place than a cloud service provider? One of the useful things about AWS is that it provides everything you need from purchasing a domain to hosting and launching your site.

For this project I used AWS S3 bucket, and Route 53. S3 bucket works similarly to storage space. It provides high availability and scalability to store your content, files, and anything else. Route 53 is AWS DNS service. I first went and purchased a random domain name off of AWS domain name service. After waiting for approval, I created a S3 bucket and then uploaded a premade and basic HTML and CSS file into the S3 bucket. After that, I wanted to make it into a static website for the sake of simplicity and affordability. By clicking on the S3 bucket and going to properties and scrolling down, I changed the settings so that it is updated to a static website. I also wanted to turn on public access so that other users can access my site.

If you go back to the S3 bucket and open the HTML file viola, the site is up and ready! However, you’ll notice that the URL is not the domain name you purchased, that is because you need to change the routing name.

You can update this setting in AWS Route 53 and create a new record for redirecting the site with these changes:

Route traffic to:

Alias to S3 website endpoint

Making sure the AZ is the same as the bucket (for me it was US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1

Now if you go back to the HTML file and open the file. It is now using the correct domain name!

I hope this was helpful! And I hope you will continue to follow me on my journey to learn AWS.