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.

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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