Leaving Wordpress for a Static Blog | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Wordpress for a Static Blog

otherlab.com

15 pointsheyrhett5 comments

example.com must auto-redirect to www.example.com

Unfortunately, there is no way to host your "root domain" out of an amazon s3 bucket

This is possible using an alias record:

Can I point my zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) at my website hosted on Amazon S3? Yes. Amazon Route 53 offers a special type of record called an ‘Alias’ record that lets you map your zone apex (example.com) DNS name to your Amazon S3 website bucket (i.e. example.com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com). IP addresses associated with Amazon S3 website endpoints can change at any time due to scaling up, scaling down, or software updates. Route 53 responds to each request for an Alias record with one IP address for the bucket. Route 53 doesn't charge for queries to Alias records that are mapped to an S3 bucket that is configured as a website. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

http://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#S3_Zone_apex

Thanks, byoung2! I will add that edit to the blog. If you could elaborate, I'd love to describe a little clearer how it works practically.

Basically, the zone apex (example.com) has to point to an IP address (a DNS A record). The problem with some AWS services (e.g. S3, Elastic Load Balancers, Cloudfront) is that you don't have a static IP address to point to because as scalable services, you are hosted over many servers which can change at any time. If you host your DNS on Amazon Route53, you can take advantage of Alias records, which are exclusive to Amazon. Basically, an alias record lets you point example.com at a resource (S3 bucket, load balancer), and Amazon will periodically look up the current IP address and return it when that record is looked up. These records are served with a relatively short TTL to allow for constantly-changing IP addresses.

You can also do this with WWWizer if you do not host your DNS with Amazon. I go over this in a tutorial I wrote for Jekyll, but it applies to any static website generator (or any site at all, really.)

http://andrewmunsell.com/tutorials/jekyll-by-example/

I find it fascinating that all the hackers start from scratch instead of creating a plugin which takes the templates, tools, & posts they already have on wordpress and figure out how to create a plugin which does more intelligent caching or even creates a static site.

In terms of security there is a lot you can do to tighten up a base wordpress install.

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