Root Domain Website Hosting for Amazon S3

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/root-domain-website-hosting-for-amazon-s3.html

by jeffbarr • 14 years ago

254 83 14 years ago

aws.typepad.com

toomuchtodo3• 14 years ago

Great work guys! Now can we work on functionality to prepay for AWS services? ;)

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=51931

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

Considering this is off topic and 2 year old request, I'd say drop it. Also I see little reason for this functionality, what is a use case that cannot be worked around?

EwanToo• 14 years ago

Pretty much all the posts on that thread are reasons for the functionality:

* Transaction fees that people have to pay on their credit card

* Budgeting purposes

* Expense handling if you're buying the company services on a personal card (this happens a lot more than you'd expect)

* Company shared accounts where the finance/purchasing department wants to do the old invoice / payment dance - finance department gets invoice for $5000, pays it in the background, developers get on with their work.

* Applying a cap on your spending

* Lack of credit cards in many parts of the world

I'm sure there's dozens of reasons why you'd want to prepay, and it's clearly something Amazon want to support, judging by their staff's comments on the page.

toomuchtodo3• 14 years ago

You miss the point; AWS staff say its something they're working on. For two years. Either say you're not doing it or commit to doing it. Don't drag it out. Its a somewhat pathetic way to respond to customers.

nikcub• 14 years ago

Prepay and keeping user balances puts you in an entirely new compliance bracket that is much more complicated than charging a credit card and shipping a product. You get regulated almost like a bank.

I'm not surprised that they aren't bothering with all that yet

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

Depends on how you treat it. If you treat it like buying a gift card, and either don't allow refunds or only refund to the same payment mechanism the user originally used, then you shouldn't trigger any of the "financial instrument" regulations. That just leaves you with any issues raised by your credit card processor, about whether you've "delivered" the product the user purchased.

toomuchtodo3• 14 years ago

Really? Because Twilio seems to handle it just fine. Charge card when balance falls below certain balance, and you can't get the funds back without a really good reason.

You know, just like Amazon gift card balances applied to your consumer Amazon account.

mmastrac• 14 years ago

This is great news. Back when we were building DotSpots (now defunct, sadly), our website was built entirely in GWT. We weren't just serving a static site - we had the full functionality being run in GWT-compiled code. This meant that the majority of the site itself could be hosted from a static domain, and only the APIs behind the scenes needed to be running on our EC2 fleet. At least that was the idea.

We managed to get the majority of the static images and JS running off CloudFront back then, but were always stuck serving html from our EC2 boxes (a combination of what was available from AWS at the time, and the previous one-day minimum timeout of CloudFront). We put a lot of work into optimizing them so that they'd be super lightweight and could be served quickly. It was pretty fast considering that we weren't able to put all of the static-like files into S3/CloudFront.

Now that you can host the whole static bits of your domain through S3/CloudFront, I'd love to give this another shot with a future project. With strongly-named resources (ie: resource name == MD5) being served with one-year expiration times from Amazon's infrastructure, you could build a blazing fast dynamic site without having to spin up a single EC2 box.

Exciting!

(My original comment was on the dupe here... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4976475)

twistedpair• 14 years ago

One of the many reasons I <3 GWT. Why run all the logic on the server if it can live in the client? Currently working on the same with www.runpartner.com from S3/EC2/CF.

jvoorhis• 14 years ago

This is great news. Now I'm looking forward to root domain support for CloudFront.

nodesocket• 14 years ago

Instead of using www.mydomain.com as the primary and 301 redirecting requests from mydomain.com, is it possible to do this the other way around? I want mydomain.com as the primary and 301 redirect www.mydomain.com.

surrealize• 14 years ago

Yeah, that's what this example does:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/websit...

"In this step, you will configure both buckets for website hosting. First, you will configure example.com as a website and then you'll configure www.example.com to redirect all requests to the example.com bucket."

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

I just set it up with non-www as the primary, works like a charm.

mdrussell• 14 years ago

So now all your root domains can suffer extended downtime on a monthly basis too? :)

zwily• 14 years ago

What are you talking about? The last big S3 outage was like 5 years ago.

davidandgoliath• 14 years ago

Troll elsewhere ;)

donretag• 14 years ago

Now only if Google App Engine would support the same.

The amount of features that AWS release is astonishing given their size. Great work.

arikrak• 14 years ago

I have sites on Amazon S3 and OpenShift, but my Domain Name registar (1&1) didn't support redirection, so I pointed it to Cloudflare and created a rule there to redirect from the root to 'www'. This looks simpler though.

roozbeh18• 14 years ago

back when google apps for business was free, they had an option to redirect your naked domain to www under domains. then all you had to do was to point your A record to google dns and it would forward it to www.

yosun2• 14 years ago

i guess amazon no longer needs the naturally free publicity from having 90% of CDN content URLs being of the format xxx.s3.amazonaws.com ... you can now have CDN URLs that look like xxx.yourdomain.com :O ... AMAZING!!!

well, let's hope adding domain hosting to amazon doesn't add to further downtime.

yosun2• 14 years ago

sorry for sarc over-simplifying the new offering. :(

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

You're not over-simplifying, you're just wrong.

S3 and CloudFront have supported custom subdomains for years.

Inufu• 14 years ago

You could always have that, but now you can use just "yourdomain.com" instead of a subdomain.

gregr• 14 years ago

Interesting. Root level cnames go against the RFC spec, yet it seems this solution is technically on par. Looking at the linked site, users mark the root as an A record and then select a new option in Route53 called 'Alias'. Since many DNS providers enforce actual A records, sounds like route53 will often be required for this feature (not a show stopper for most, just checking).

FTA: "In the Amazon Route 53 Management Console, create two records for your domain. Create an A (alias) record in the domain's DNS hosted zone, mark it as an Alias, then choose the value that corresponds to your root domain name.

Create a CNAME record and set the value to the S3 website endpoint for the first bucket."

isb2• 14 years ago

Route 53 alias feature is RFC compliant - we will return an A record for an apex alias. Aliases can be used at non-apex too to avoid following CNAME chains. So, for e.g., the configuration in docs can be improved upon by having www.example be an alias to example.com instead of a CNAME.

saurik12• 14 years ago

Why do people host static websites on S3 at all? It really isn't designed for that: it is an object store. Yes: it has a URL structure accessible in a way that makes it look like static hosting, and Amazon caved pretty early to people wanting to use it that way by adding features to make it more reasonable, but it doesn't fix the underlying problem.

Specifically, it is both allowed to--and often does--return 50x errors to requests. The documentation for the S3 API states you should immediately retry; that's fine for an API where I can code that logic into my client library, but is simply an unacceptable solution on the web. Maybe there are one or two exceptions to this, but I have simply never seen a web browser retry these requests: the result is you just get broken images, broken stylesheets, or even entire broken pages. Back when Twitter used to serve user avatar pictures directly from S3 the issue was downright endemic (as you'd often load a page with 30 small images to request from S3, so every few pages you'd come across a dud).

Sure, it only happens to some small percentage of requests, but for a popular website that can be a lot of people (and even for an unpopular one, every user counts), and it is orders of magnitude higher of a random error rate than I've experience with my own hosting on EC2; it is also irritating because it is random: when my own hosting fails, it fails in its entirely: I don't have some tiny fraction of requests for users all over the world failing.

Regardless, I actually have an administrative need to stop hosting a specific x.com to www.x.com redirect on some non-AWS hosting I have (the DNS is hosted by Route53, etc., but I was left with a dinky HTTP server in Kentucky somewhere handling the 301), and I figured "well, if it doesn't have to actually request through to an underlying storage system, maybe I won't run into problems; I mean, how hard is it to take a URL and just immediately return a 301?", but after just a few minutes of playing with it I managed to get a test request that was supposed to return a 301 returning a 500 error instead. :(

    HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
    x-amz-request-id: 1A631406498520D6
    x-amz-id-2: hXQ1YXyu0gxaiGITKvcB+P8+tgPsP3UITX/Or4emyjZtaL16ULAyHFx2ROT4QPXY
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Content-Length: 354
    Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 07:19:24 GMT
    Connection: close
    Server: AmazonS3

This wasn't just a single-time problem either: I've setup a loop requesting random files (based on the timestamp of the test run and a sequence number from the test) off this pure-redirect bucket that I've left running for a few minutes, and some of the S3 nodes I'm talking to (72.21.194.13 being a great example) are just downright unreliable, often returning 500 errors in small clumps (that one node is giving me a 2% failure rate!!). S3 is simply not an appropriate mechanism for site hosting, and it is a shame that Amazon is encouraging people to misuse it in this fashion.

(edit: Great, and now someone downvoted me: would you like more evidence that this is a problem?)

notaddicted• 14 years ago

It is very easy to set up S3 to provide the files to cloudfront ... have you seen any issues with that?

saurik12• 14 years ago

I believe not: I'm pretty certain putting CloudFront in front of your bucket is fine (it handles the HTTP layering correctly); this problem is one of attempting to directly host static content from S3 only.

(That said, I have very little personal experience with CloudFront, as in my experience it is more expensive for fewer features with less POPs than using a "real CDN" like CDNetworks, or even Akamai.)

(edit:)

For this specific circumstance, I'm not certain at all what CloudFront's behavior will be; it seems like the "redirect" concept is a property of the "static website hosting" feature of S3, not part of the underlying bucket, and CloudFront "normally" (in quotes, as I just mean the default origin options it provides) directly accesses the bucket.

I thereby imagine that if I simply set a custom origin to the ___.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com URL provided by the S3 static hosting feature I will get the right behavior (where CloudFront forwards and caches the 301 responses), but then I have no clue if it will correctly retry the 500 error responses.

That said, I will point out that I am not even certain if CloudFront retries the 500 requests anyway: it occurred to me that with a small error rate combined with a cache, if you (as I somewhat did at least) expect the potential fix to be S3-specific, you might simply never really "catch" an actual failing request in a test scenario.

It could then be that CloudFront retries all 50x failures (in which case if I set it up with a custom origin to the S3 static hosting URL you'd still get the retry behavior), but I somehow doubt that it does that (and just earlier I saw two requests in a row to S3 fail for these 301 redirects, so it might not even help).

johnbellone2• 14 years ago

I spent some time over the past weekend migrating my static-generated blog over to S3+CF and the only problems that I ran into were invalidation and permissions on the bucket. It is likely a result of my lack of knowledge of S3 bucket/CF utilities, but I've been using s3cmd for sync.

Definitely impressed with how quickly it went. I muddled through setting up AWS DNS, S3 and CF through a bunch of blog articles. But it was well worth the time investment.

pixie_• 14 years ago

This is pretty interesting, I'd like to hear more about it. I'd also like Amazon to hear more about it because maybe they could treat web buckets differently or something.

mixedbit• 14 years ago

I'm in a middle of creating a web application, and my plan was to serve static files from S3. Based on your post, it seems like a really bad idea. If the problems are so apparent, I wonder why this is so generally accepted and recommended approach. One example, Heroku guide that praises putting static files on S3: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3

aidos3• 14 years ago

As always, test for yourself but I wouldn't hesitate to use S3.

I host 1.5 million images on S3 and I've never had issues with 500 errors. I've also done extensive testing of S3 under load and it's simply amazing.

Frankly S3 is one of the few bits of infrastructure I DO trust.

mixonic2• 14 years ago

I've been messing with S3 for a new project involving the HTML5 canvas- So lots of CORS and canvas security concerns, PUTing objects from the browser, and desire for low-latency changes.

S3 has not been delivering. Here's a few reasons:

* S3 only provides read-after-write consistency for non-standard regions: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#What_data_consistency_model_d... Since moving to US-West-1, we've had noticeably more latency. Working without read-after-write just isn't an option, users get old data for the first few seconds after data is pushed.

* CORS support is basically broken. S3 doesn't return the proper headers for browsers to understand how objects should be cached: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=112772

* Oh, and the editor for CORS data introduces newlines into your config around the AllowedHost that BREAK the configuration. So you need to manually delete them when you make a change. Don't forget!

* 304 responses strip out cache headers: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=104930... Not breaking spec right now, but quite non-standard.

* I swear, I get 403s and other errors at a higher rate than I have from any custom store in the past. But this is purely subjective.

Based on all this- I really need to agree with saurik that the folks at S3 aren't taking their role as an HTTP API seriously enough. They built an API on HTTP, but not an API that browsers can successfully work with. Things are broken in very tricky ways, and I'd caution anybody working with S3 on the front-end of their application to consider the alternatives.

I'm moving some things to Google Cloud Storage right now, and it is blazing fast, supports CORS properly, and has read-after-write consistency for the whole service. Rackspace is going to get back to me, but I expect they could do the same (and they have real support).

jeffbarr2• 14 years ago

Regarding this bug:

> CORS support is basically broken. S3 doesn't return the proper headers for browsers to understand how objects should be cached:

The S3 team is working to address this. We're investigating the other issues and always appreciate your feedback.

zzzeek• 14 years ago

I host very small-time sites for a few family members on S3 because it is practically free (pennies per month) and there's more or less zero chance some script kiddie will break in and deface it, as was the case when they were going the traditional "php/wordpress on godaddy" route. EC2 is great but for hosting tiny non-money-making sites it's way more expensive and maintenance consuming, a micro comes out to $14 a month and a small comes out to $46 a month. For a site that gets hit a few hundred times a week tops, you're just paying for tons of idle time. A very rare 500 error (I've never seen that before) is not an issue in this case.

ubojan• 14 years ago

Because it's easy? I have 100 static websites on S3. After initial setup of buckets, it's trivial to update/sync all of these sites using command line tool (I use S3 Sync) with one click on a batch file. And hosting on S3 is cheap.

jeffbarr2• 14 years ago

We investigated your report of issues with requests, and found that one S3 host was behaving incorrectly. We identified the root cause and deployed a fix. Can you verify that we have fixed your issue?

saurik12• 14 years ago

(I also have this specific high-500 rate as case 81302771, which I humorously did not get an answer to yet; I got a response asking for more information which I provided before going to sleep this morning, but no resolution... yet I switch back to HN and you have responded here? ;P)

I cannot replicate the really-high 500 rate anymore on 72.21.194.13 (the node that was particularly bad). However, I'm still concerned about what caused that: Is it likely to happen again? Why did it only happen to that one node? (In essence: help me trust this system ;P.)

However, what I'm most interested in is whether the "static website hosting" endpoint of S3 (the *.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com URLs) has different semantics than S3 normally does, so that under "normal interaction" scenarios[1] I can rely on "this will do its best to not return a 500 error, retrying if required to get the underlying S3 blob".

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4977360

stevencorona2• 14 years ago

I serve over 4 billion images out of S3 and don't have any issues with 50x errors.

saurik12• 14 years ago

As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, this is documented behavior from S3. I also have billions of objects in S3, and I definitely get back 500 errors. I'm sorry, but even the CTO of Twitpic is not in a position to say "we push infinitely more data than you, so we know better", at least not for S3 ;P.

Honestly, I have to ask: would you know if some tiny percentage of your requests failed with a 500 error? I bet the answer is "no", as the idea that you wrote some JavaScript to look for a condition you probably didn't realize could happen is almost 0. I'd love to be surprised, however ;P.

(That said, as you are hosting "images", at least you could detect it with JavaScript and fix it, so one could thereby imagine a realistic reason why this would not be a serious problem for you; however, I'd argue that you are then treating S3 as an API, not as a static web hosting system.)

I have one bucket that has 3,148,859,832 objects in it <- I got that number from the AWS Account Activity for S3, StandardStorage / StorageObjectCount metric. I apparently make 1-2 million GET requests off of it per hour. Yesterday, Amazon returned a 500 error to me 35 times, or 1-2 per hour.

That's about a 1 in a million chance of failure, but if you are serving 4 billion images out of S3 (assuming you mean # requests and not # objects), then that means that 4,000 of your requests failed with a 500 error. That's 4,000 people out there who didn't get to see their image today.

So, seriously: are you certain that didn't happen? That out of the billions of people you are serving images to off of Twitpic, that you don't have some small percentage of unhappy people getting 500 errors? Again: it is a small chance of failure, but when it happens the browser won't retry.

As I said: "it only happens to some small percentage of requests, but for a popular website that can be a lot of people (and even for an unpopular one, every user counts)" <- websites like ours serve tens to hundreds of millions of users billions of requests... one-in-a-million actually happens.

(edit: Also, I will note that you seem to be using CloudFront to serve the images from S3, which might be a very different ballgame than serving directly out of S3; for all we know, CloudFront's special knowledge of S3 might cause it to automatically retry 500 errors; for that matter, the "website" feature of S3 could be doing this as well, but I have yet to get word from Amazon on whether that's the case... just pulling directly from the bucket using the normal REST API endpoint does, however, return 500 errors in the way they document.)

xingquan• 14 years ago

Hello,

Have you tried setting a redirection rule on your bucket so that when the 500 error occurs, S3 will automatically retry the request? You can set a redirection rule in the S3 console, and I think the following rule might work:

This will redirect all 500s back to the same location, effectively re-trying the request. This should cover the random 500 case but I'm not sure that it will work 100% of the time though.

koenbok• 14 years ago

This sounds like a possible solution. Have you tried or tested this?

aneth4• 14 years ago

You can also use a service like dnsimple that offers more generalized aliases to any domain. As I understand it, you can only alias to AWS services with Route 53, but that may have changed.

I've been using Dnsimple for quite a while to host root domains on heroku.

donavanm2• 14 years ago

Sad face indeed. I wish route 53 had generic "alias" support like other providers. IIRC Route 53 can ALIAS to 1) your own hosted zone 2) an ELB instance 3) an S3 website bucket.

weakwire• 14 years ago

Time for heroku to implement root domain redirection!

asc76• 14 years ago

AWS just keeps on getting better and better. Although, this particular release isn't that exciting and press-worthy.

api• 14 years ago

Combined with the ability to set headers to permit AJAX requests to another site, it would be possible to host a webapp on S3 and have the "live" portion be a JSON API only.

bradgessler• 14 years ago

Check out shart at https://github.com/polleverywhere/shart if you're looking for an easy way to deploy static websites, like Middleman, to S3.

philip1209• 14 years ago

You can do similar hosting on the Rackspace/Akamai CDN:

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/running-jekyll-on-rackspace-cl...

That's how the Obama fundraising website was hosted

WestCoastJustin• 14 years ago

As far as I know, Rackspace was not involved with the Obama fundraising website (other than this blog post which talks about Jekyll). Obama fundraising website was Jekyll/Akamai/AWS[EC2,S3,RDS] [1]. You can also watch a video from most of the Obama ops team about the stack on AWS [2].

[1] http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/interviews/chatting-with-ob...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg

miles932• 14 years ago

I can confirm that.

akulbe• 14 years ago

Given Amazon's recent outages (and the fact that they happen a lot more frequently)... hearing about this new service offering doesn't instill a lot of confidence.

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

Essentially all outages in the last few years have been EBS related.

S3 doesn't have an EBS dependency, and has been pretty rock-solid for half a decade now.

magoon• 14 years ago

I host a web site for my small community on S3 because it's nearly free to do so and, for such a small site with no server-side programming, it performs better and is more fault tolerant than a cheap VPS.

mleonhard• 14 years ago

If you want hosted root domain redirects without switching to Route 53, you can use https://www.RootRedirect.com/ . I run it on multiple EC2 instances and EIPs. Notable customers include Pizza Hut Australia and Airport Nürnberg. My 301 responses are cached on the client so subsequent redirects are instantaneous.

saurik12• 14 years ago

These 301 redirects seem to be billed as "WebsiteGetObject,Requests-Tier2", which I believe is $0.01 per 10,000 (not including bandwidth, and with no decrease in price for large scale). I mean, its nice that its hosted in the cloud and all, but billing at the same rate as a much more complex S3 GET request (or "GetObject,Requests-Tier2") seems much too expensive (although I can imagine that if you have only a small number of requests; if you have any other server on which you can host the 301 redirect, you can do so with a marginal cost near 0, even at a load of many millions of redirects per day.

Root Domain Website Hosting for Amazon S3

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