How to use Amazon S3 for hosting web pages and media files?

This document explains working of Bucket Explorer Team Edition, applicable for an older version of Bucket Explorer Team Edition. If you are using Bucket Explorer version 2010.10.04.02, this link contain expended feature Amazon s3 adds a new feature for hosting  Static Website . Please click here to see How to host static websites on Amazon S3 service with Bucket explorer ?  

 

Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple web server to access any file that is stored in their storage cloud. This means, you can access files stored at S3, directly via a web browser, if you have set the permissions as "read" for all users. Many of our clients are using S3 to host media files, which do not need scripting on the web server side and require a lot of bandwidth to serve, e.g. images, flash movies, audio files etc.

You can also use Amazon CloudFront ^[optional] services to improve hosting media files with faster speed.

Review the step by step instructions to host media files on Amazon S3:

Create and activate your Amazon S3 Account. Start the Bucket Explorer. Insert your Access key [1] and Secret key [1] and click on " Go " button. After successful logon, Bucket Explorer prompts you " Do you want to save credentials at local machine for future use [2] ?". Click on " Save with password " or " Save without password " to save it. Now create a bucket [3] in which you wish to store images or other media files (eg. images.bucketexplorer.com) [ optional ] Create a CNAME [4] entry into your domain's DNS Manager interface and point it towards s3.amazonaws.com Select the bucket and upload images in it. Now give the READ permission to ALL USERS . For doing this right click on images and choose " Update Object's Access Control List " option, Check the READ permission for ALL USERS and click on "Save" permission button. Now again right click on images and choose " Generate Web URL " option. [ optional ] Click on " Use Bucket Name as Virtual Host " [5] button to modify all URLs according to your CNAME entry. (it would look like - http://images.bucketexplorer.com/buynowheaderbtn.png Click on " Copy all " button. This will copy all the URLs on the clip board. Now the images are ready for public sharing or you can use URLs in your website. You have done it. Enjoy!

1. ˆ Access Key & Secret key : Access key and secret key are just like user id and password which authenticate the user to access the Amazon s3 account .
2. ˆ Credentials : Bucket Explorer saves Access key and Secret key in encrypted form at local machine. Next time user can easily connect without inserting of those keys.
3. ˆ Bucket : Each of the files and folders stored in Amazon S3 is contained in a bucket. It's like "top level folder" or "top level drive". Bucket names are globally unique, i.e. since we have cretaed a bucket named "images.bucketexplorer.com", you cannot create this same bucket in your account. If you want to use these buckets for web hosting, try to choose a bucket name, which is a valid host name and everything should be lower case:
   
   Valid Name : bucket2008, 1bucket, 01_bucket, 01.bucket, www.example.com
   Invalid Name :_bucket, .bucket, -bucket, 01-.bucket,01.-bucket, 127.0.0.1
    
4. ˆ CNAME : This is optional; if you like to generate the public URL using your own domain name, you should use CNAME entry. Otherwise user will see s3.amazonaws.com in the URL.
   
   Example : For a bucket named images.bucketexplorer.com, the CNAME entry would point to images.bucketexplorer.com.s3.amazonaws.com. Once this is done, a file, "buynowheaderbtn.png" hosted in this bucket can be accessed via two URLs:
   http://images.bucketexplorer.com.s3.amazonaws.com/buynowheaderbtn.png , or http://images.bucketexplorer.com/buynowheaderbtn.png .
    
5. ˆ Use Bucket Name as Virtual Host : This is optional. Bucket Explorer replace s3.amazonaws.com with bucket name and construct the URL using the bucket name. Make sure the bucket name is a fully qualified host name and a CNAME entry exists for it in your DNS server before choosing this option to create the URLs;
   
   Example of Virtual Host URL : http://images.bucketexplorer.com/buynowheaderbtn.png
    
6. ˆ Amazon CloudFront : Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments. Amazon CloudFront service is faster because when you upload files to Amazon S3 and configure them with CloudFront, a copy of S3 files will be cached in various Amazon servers that are spread across important cities in US, Europe and Asia.
   Let's take an example of high data transfer speeds : Suppose a website is hosted on a web server that’s located in some part of America. Now if we have a visitor from India, the page loading time for him will be relatively high because of the geographic distance between India and America. As the content delivery network has servers across the world and they automatically determine the fastest (or the shortest) route between the server hosting the site and the end-user so a visitor from India will be served content by the server located in Asia with improved speed.
   
   Click to know more about:
   Amazon CloudFront services .
   What is the difference between Amazon S3 and CloudFront?

Related Topics :

• How to share a file using Amazon S3?

• How to generate URL for Amazon S3?

• How to use Amazon S3 as an image hosting service?

• Virtual hosting of Amazon S3 bucket

• How to set S3 Bucket as S3 Website ?