S3 Static Website Hosting and Transfer Acceleration

Amazon S3 is not just a place to store files — it can also serve an entire static website directly from a bucket. Combined with CloudFront and Transfer Acceleration, S3 delivers content globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.

S3 Static Website Hosting

S3 can host static websites consisting of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and other client-side files. There is no server-side processing — every file is served exactly as stored.

When to Use S3 Static Hosting

Good For	Not Suitable For
Single-page applications (React, Vue, Angular)	Server-side rendering (Node.js, PHP, Python)
Marketing and landing pages	Database-backed applications
Documentation sites	User authentication flows
Portfolio or blog sites (pre-built)	Dynamic API endpoints

Setting Up Static Website Hosting

Step 1: Create a bucket with the website name

aws s3 mb s3://my-static-site-example

Step 2: Enable static website hosting

aws s3 website s3://my-static-site-example \
  --index-document index.html \
  --error-document error.html

Step 3: Disable Block Public Access (required for public websites)

aws s3api put-public-access-block \
  --bucket my-static-site-example \
  --public-access-block-configuration \
    BlockPublicAcls=false,IgnorePublicAcls=false,BlockPublicPolicy=false,RestrictPublicBuckets=false

Step 4: Add a bucket policy to allow public reads

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-static-site-example/*"
    }
  ]
}

aws s3api put-bucket-policy --bucket my-static-site-example --policy file://website-policy.json

Step 5: Upload your website files

aws s3 sync ./build/ s3://my-static-site-example/

Website Endpoint URL

The website endpoint follows this pattern:

http://<bucket-name>.s3-website-<region>.amazonaws.com

For example: http://my-static-site-example.s3-website-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com

Note: The website endpoint uses HTTP, not HTTPS. For HTTPS, you need CloudFront.

Adding CloudFront for HTTPS and Performance

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches your website at edge locations around the world.

Benefits of CloudFront with S3

Benefit	Description
HTTPS	Free SSL/TLS certificate via AWS Certificate Manager
Custom domain	Use your own domain name (e.g. www.example.com)
Caching	Content cached at 400+ edge locations globally
Lower latency	Users are served from the nearest edge location
DDoS protection	Built-in AWS Shield Standard

Architecture

User → CloudFront (Edge Location) → S3 Bucket (Origin)

CloudFront retrieves the content from S3 on the first request, caches it, and serves subsequent requests directly from the edge — much faster than fetching from S3 every time.

Origin Access Control (OAC)

Instead of making the bucket public, you can keep it private and let CloudFront access it using Origin Access Control:

Create a CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.
Enable Origin Access Control.
Update the bucket policy to allow access only from CloudFront.

This is the recommended approach — your bucket stays private while CloudFront serves the content publicly.

S3 Static Website Hosting and Transfer Acceleration

S3 Static Website Hosting and Transfer Acceleration