Amazon S3 static web hosting not working with custom domain name (dot issue)

Question

I followed the instruction on S3 doc to host a static website there. Everything works with the domain name provided by S3. I can access "examplebucket.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com"

However, when I forward my own custom domain name, the domain name provider added a dot at the very end of my domain, then it's like I'm accessing "examplebucket.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.", this won't work because Amazon thinks you're accessing a different address. And then give me 404 error.

Is there any workaround for this? or any place I should set up in S3?

Answer 1

I know this is too late for the original question but there may be more people with the same issues (me last week).

I was having the same issue while trying to create a route in route53 with CloudFormation. I was trying to redirect my domain www.example.com to example-bucket.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com .

It turns out you cannot redirect to an arbitrary bucket. The bucket name must be the same as the domain you're trying to alias. So if you want to redirect www.example.com , your bucket name must be www.example.com and the URL must be www.example.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com .

Moreover cloudformation has a weird syntax. Cloudformation doesn't need the name of the bucket (it already knows it). It only needs the endpoint.

So instead of using something like

"AliasTarget": {
               "DNSName" : "example-bucket.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com",
               "HostedZoneId" : "<zoneID>"
             },

you need

"AliasTarget": {
               "DNSName" : "s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com",
               "HostedZoneId" : "<zoneID>"
             },

And route53 where to redirect because the name of the route must be the same as the name of the bucket.

Related question https://stackoverflow.com/a/5048129/54256