Support for Amazon S3 Websites

Today I received this email from Amazon AWS. It may be possible that this can produce the highest performance boost configuration, serving the ENTIRE anonymous website from a CDN. I don't know if it's possible (and we no longer use boost, we use varnish etc), but I think this is worth looking into. If it works out, I'm sure the performance of using S3 + Cloudfront will exceed any kind of varnish/pressflow config we might otherwise arrange.

Dear Amazon S3 Customer,

We're excited to announce new features that make it easy to host static websites on Amazon S3. Customers already use Amazon S3 to host images, video, and other content for their websites, but until now they haven't been able to effectively host their entire website on Amazon S3. That's because even though customers can configure an Amazon S3 bucket as a website, users accessing the root of the website (e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/) would see the list of objects in the Amazon S3 bucket instead of the website's home page. Also, if an error occurred, users would see an Amazon S3 error message instead of a website specific error message. In response to customer requests, we've added support for root and custom error documents to address these issues.

With these new features, Amazon S3 now provides a simple and inexpensive way to host your website in one place. To get started, open the Amazon S3 Management Console, and follow these simple steps:

1) Right-click on your Amazon S3 bucket and open the Properties pane
2) Configure your root and error documents in the Website tab
3) Click Save
For more information on hosting your static website on Amazon S3, review the Amazon S3 Developer Guide or attend the Introduction to Amazon S3 Website Features webinar on February 24th.

Sincerely,

The Amazon S3 Team