How to Host a Website on Amazon S3 (Step-by-Step Guide)

Building a website used to require setting up complex servers, managing expensive hardware, or getting locked into rigid hosting contracts. Today, cloud computing has changed the landscape entirely. If you have a simple site made of HTML, CSS, and images, you don’t need a heavy-duty server. You just need a place to store your files that the world can access.

This is where Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) comes in. While S3 is famous for file storage, it also has a “secret” superpower: it can host static websites for pennies a month. It’s a favorite solution for developers, freelancers, and small businesses who want a site that is incredibly fast, rarely goes down, and costs almost nothing to run.

However, jumping into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) console can be intimidating. The interface is packed with thousands of options, buttons, and technical terms. If you’ve never used AWS before, it’s easy to get lost.

This guide cuts through the noise. We will walk you through exactly how to host a static website on Amazon S3, step-by-step. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have your site live on the internet, secure, and ready for visitors.

What Is Amazon S3 Website Hosting?

Before we dive into the technical setup, it is important to understand what “static website hosting” actually means.

A static website is a site where the content is delivered to the user exactly as it is stored. It consists of fixed files—HTML for structure, CSS for styling, and JavaScript for interactivity. When a visitor goes to your URL, the browser simply downloads these files and displays them. There is no database processing or server-side code (like PHP or Python) running in the background to build the page on the fly.

Dynamic websites, like WordPress or Facebook, are different. They build pages in real-time based on who is logged in or what data is requested. S3 cannot host these dynamic sites directly because it doesn’t have a “brain” (a server) to process that logic.

When S3 is the right choice

S3 is the perfect hosting solution for:

• Portfolios and Resumes: Simple sites showcasing your work.
• Landing Pages: Marketing pages for a product or event.
• Documentation Sites: Technical manuals or help guides.
• Event Sites: Informational pages for weddings or conferences.
• Blogs (generated statically): Sites built with tools like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby.

When S3 is the wrong choice

S3 is not suitable if you need:

• User Logins: Membership sites where content changes based on the user.
• eCommerce Stores: Complex shopping carts with inventory management (though you can use third-party JavaScript tools for simple checkouts).
• Heavy Database Interaction: Sites that need to constantly read and write to a database like MySQL.

Benefits of Hosting a Website on Amazon S3

Why choose S3 over a traditional hosting provider like Bluehost or GoDaddy? The advantages are significant, especially for smaller projects.

Low cost and high scalability

S3 follows a “pay-as-you-go” model. There are no monthly contracts or flat fees. You only pay for the storage you use and the data that gets transferred out to visitors. For a typical small website with low traffic, your monthly bill might be less than $1.00—sometimes even pennies.

Scalability is automatic. If your site suddenly goes viral and gets 100,000 visitors in an hour, S3 won’t crash. It is designed to handle massive amounts of traffic without you needing to upgrade a server plan.

High availability and durability

Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of durability. This means the likelihood of Amazon losing your files is infinitesimally small. Your website is stored across multiple servers in different physical locations (Data Centers), ensuring that if one server fails, your site stays online.

No server maintenance

With traditional hosting, you often have to worry about updating operating systems, patching security vulnerabilities, or restarting servers. With S3, there are no servers for you to manage. Amazon handles all the infrastructure, security patches, and hardware maintenance. You just upload your files and walk away.

What You Need Before You Start

To follow this tutorial, you need three things:

1. An AWS Account: You can sign up for free at aws.amazon.com. New accounts often get 12 months of “Free Tier” usage, which covers most of what we’ll do here.
2. Website Files: You need an index.html file (your homepage) and potentially an error.html file (for 404 errors).
3. A Custom Domain (Optional): If you want your site to be www.yourname.com instead of a long Amazon URL, you need to buy a domain name. You can buy this through Amazon (Route 53) or a third-party registrar like Namecheap or GoDaddy.

Step-by-Step: How to Host a Website on Amazon S3

Ready to go live? Follow these steps carefully.

1. Create an S3 Bucket

In Amazon S3, a “bucket” is like a root folder on your computer. It holds all your website files.

1. Log in to the AWS Management Console.
2. In the search bar at the top, type S3 and click the S3 service.
3. Click the orange Create bucket button.
4. Bucket Name: This is crucial. If you plan to use a custom domain (like www.example.com), your bucket name must match exactly.
   • Correct: www.example.com
   • Incorrect: my-website-bucket
   • Note: Bucket names must be globally unique across all of Amazon S3. If someone else has taken your name, you cannot use it.
5. AWS Region: Choose the region closest to your target audience (e.g., US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1).
6. Leave all other settings as default for now and scroll down to click Create bucket.

2. Upload Website Files

Now that your bucket exists, it’s time to put your website inside it.

1. Click on the name of your newly created bucket to open it.
2. Click the orange Upload button.
3. Drag and drop your website files (index.html, error.html, style.css, images, etc.) into the window.
   • Important: Ensure your main homepage file is named index.html (all lowercase).
4. Click Upload at the bottom of the page.
5. Wait for the green “Upload succeeded” banner, then click Close.

3. Enable Static Website Hosting

By default, an S3 bucket is private and just stores files. You need to tell Amazon to treat this bucket like a website.

1. Inside your bucket, click the Properties tab near the top.
2. Scroll all the way to the bottom to find Static website hosting.
3. Click Edit.
4. Select Enable.
5. For Hosting type, choose Host a static website.
6. Index document: Type index.html. This tells S3 which file to load when someone visits your root URL.
7. Error document: Type error.html (if you uploaded one). This page appears if a visitor tries to find a page that doesn’t exist.
8. Click Save changes.

After saving, scroll back down to the Static website hosting section. You will now see a Bucket website endpoint. This is your new website URL! It will look something like: http://www.example.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.

If you click it now, you will get a “403 Forbidden” error. Don’t panic—this is expected. We haven’t made the files public yet.

4. Set Bucket Permissions and Policies

AWS is secure by default, meaning nobody can see your files unless you explicitly allow it. We need to open the bucket to the public so visitors can see your site.

Step A: Turn off “Block Public Access”

1. Click the Permissions tab in your bucket.
2. Find Block public access (bucket settings) and click Edit.
3. Uncheck the box that says “Block all public access”.
4. Click Save changes.
5. A box will pop up asking for confirmation. Type confirm and click Confirm.

Step B: Add a Bucket Policy

Unblocking access isn’t enough; you now have to write a specific rule (a policy) that grants “Read” access to everyone.

1. Still in the Permissions tab, scroll down to Bucket policy and click Edit.
2. Paste the following JSON code into the policy editor. Make sure to replace YourBucketName with your actual bucket name.

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

3. Click Save changes.

Your bucket permissions should now verify that the bucket is “Publicly accessible.” Go back to the Properties tab, scroll to the bottom, and click your endpoint link again. Your website should now load perfectly!

Add a Custom Domain to Your S3 Website

Right now, your website works, but the URL is long and ugly. To use www.yourdomain.com, you need to configure DNS. The easiest way to do this is using Amazon Route 53, AWS’s domain management service.

Using Route 53

1. Go to the Route 53 service in the AWS console.
2. If you don’t own the domain yet, you can buy it under Registered domains.
3. If you already own the domain elsewhere (like GoDaddy), create a Hosted Zone in Route 53 and update your domain’s nameservers at your registrar to point to AWS.
4. Inside your Hosted Zone, click Create record.
5. Record name: Type www (or leave blank if using the root domain).
6. Record type: Leave as A - Routes traffic to an IPv4 address.
7. Toggle the Alias switch to enabled.
8. Route traffic to:
   • Choose Alias to S3 website endpoint.
   • Choose your Region.
   • Your S3 bucket should appear in the dropdown list. Select it.
9. Click Create records.

It may take a few minutes for DNS to propagate, but soon your custom domain will point to your S3 bucket.

Note: For this to work, your S3 bucket name MUST match the domain name exactly.

Enable HTTPS with CloudFront (Recommended)

There is one catch with S3 hosting: it only supports HTTP by default. This means your site will show as “Not Secure” in browsers like Chrome. To get the secure padlock icon (HTTPS), you need to use Amazon CloudFront.

CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It caches your website files on servers all over the world, making your site faster, and it allows you to attach a free SSL certificate.

Why CloudFront is necessary

• Security: Enables HTTPS/SSL encryption.
• Speed: Loads your site from a server closest to the visitor (e.g., a user in London loads files from a London server, not your US bucket).
• SEO: Google prefers secure (HTTPS) websites and fast loading times.

Quick Setup for CloudFront

1. Go to CloudFront in the AWS console and click Create distribution.
2. Origin domain: Select your S3 bucket website endpoint from the list.
   • Warning: Do not select the auto-suggested S3 bucket option. Instead, copy and paste your “Static website hosting endpoint” from the S3 Properties tab. This ensures proper routing.
3. Viewer protocol policy: Select Redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
4. Under Settings, locate Custom SSL certificate.
5. Click Request certificate (this takes you to AWS Certificate Manager). Request a free certificate for your domain (e.g., *.yourdomain.com) and validate it via DNS.
6. Once validated, go back to CloudFront and select your new certificate.
7. Click Create distribution.

You will get a new CloudFront domain name (like d12345.cloudfront.net). You then go back to Route 53 and update your domain’s Alias record to point to this CloudFront distribution instead of the S3 bucket directly.

Amazon S3 Website Hosting Costs Explained

The pricing for S3 hosting is incredibly attractive, but it helps to know how it breaks down.

• Storage Pricing: You pay for the size of files stored. In the standard tier, this is roughly $0.023 per GB. Since a static website is often only a few megabytes, this cost is usually negligible (pennies).
• Data Transfer (Bandwidth): You pay when people download your site. The first 100GB of data transfer out per month is often free. After that, it’s roughly $0.09 per GB.
• Request Costs: You pay a tiny fraction of a cent for every HTTP request (GET request) made to your site.

Typical Monthly Cost Example:
For a personal portfolio site with 1,000 visitors a month:

• Storage: $0.01
• Data Transfer: $0.00 (within free tier)
• Requests: $0.01
• Total: $0.02 per month.

If you add a custom domain (Route 53), that adds a flat fee of $0.50 per month for the hosted zone.

Limitations of Amazon S3 Hosting

While powerful, S3 hosting isn’t magic. It has specific limitations you should be aware of.

No server-side processing

As mentioned earlier, you cannot run PHP, Python, or Node.js directly on S3. You can’t host a standard WordPress installation here. If you need a contact form, you’ll need to use a third-party service (like Formspree) or AWS Lambda functions to handle the submission.

Not suitable for dynamic websites

If your website needs to show different content to different users (like a “My Account” dashboard), S3 alone isn’t enough. You would need to build a Single Page Application (SPA) using React or Vue, which can be hosted on S3 but fetches data from external APIs.

SEO and routing limitations

If you host a Single Page Application (SPA) like a React app, standard S3 routing can confuse search engines or break direct links to sub-pages. When a user refreshes a page like example.com/about, S3 might look for a folder named “about” that doesn’t exist. This is typically fixed by configuring CloudFront error pages to redirect back to index.html.

Common Issues and Troubleshooting

Even with a guide, things can go wrong. Here are the most common hiccups beginners face.

403 Forbidden errors

This is the #1 issue. It almost always means your Bucket Policy is missing or incorrect, or you forgot to uncheck Block Public Access. Go back to Step 4 and double-check your JSON policy.

Website not loading

Check your Index document setting in the Properties tab. Did you type Index.html (capital I) but upload index.html (lowercase i)? Linux servers (which S3 runs on) are case-sensitive. The names must match exactly.

Permission misconfigurations

If images are broken but the text loads, check if you uploaded the images after setting the policy. Usually, the bucket-wide policy covers everything, but sometimes individual file permissions (ACLs) can conflict. Stick to using the Bucket Policy method outlined in Step 4.

FAQs – Hosting a Website on Amazon S3

Is Amazon S3 free for website hosting?

Not entirely, but it has a very generous Free Tier for the first 12 months. After that, it is extremely cheap (often pennies a month), but you will pay for storage and bandwidth.

Can I host WordPress on S3?

No, not directly. WordPress requires a PHP server and a MySQL database. S3 only stores files. However, you can use “Static Site Generators” to convert a WordPress site into static HTML files and host those on S3.

Is S3 good for SEO?

Yes, especially when paired with CloudFront. Static sites load incredibly fast, which is a major ranking factor for Google. However, ensure you manage your metadata and sitemaps correctly, just like any other site.

How secure is S3 static hosting?

Very secure, provided you configure it correctly. Since there is no database or server operating system to hack, static sites are immune to most common web vulnerabilities like SQL injection.

What are the best alternatives to S3?

If AWS feels too complex, excellent alternatives for static hosting include GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Vercel. These platforms are often easier for beginners to set up and offer free tiers that remain free forever.

Conclusion

Hosting a website on Amazon S3 is a fantastic skill to have in your toolkit. It provides a professional, enterprise-grade hosting environment for the price of a gumball. While the initial setup involves a few technical steps—creating buckets, configuring policies, and setting up DNS—the result is a website that requires almost zero maintenance.

Once your site is live, you can sleep soundly knowing it sits on the same infrastructure that powers Netflix and Airbnb. So go ahead, upload those files, and show your work to the world!