Scripting News: Virtual hosting with S3

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Virtual hosting with S3

Today I'm going to learn something about Amazon S3 that I've been planning on learning for a bit of time.

Virtual hosting is a feature that I asked for back in July of last year, and it turned out it had already been implemented.

It makes it possible to store static stuff up in Amazon space, instead of having to rent expensive server space, which I currently do. My server bills come to $1200 every month. I think I can get that down quite a bit, using Amazon, but first I have to figure out how this works.

1. I created a CNAME, pointing aws.scripting.com to s3.amazonaws.com. When I access this address, I get the error response, which is good, it's what I expected. Next, I'll create a bucket with the name aws.scripting.com, and put some files in it. There's still part of the puzzle I don't understand, which is what is to stop anyone else from creating a bucket with that name. How does S3 decide among several buckets with that name? (Right now there are none, so when I create one, that won't be a problem.)

2. I've created the bucket, and uploaded a bunch of files, including one called lincoln.jpg. I'm getting AccessDenied as the error code now, even though (I thought) I created the bucket with full read-write access.

3. I've got the bucket working, thanks for lots of great help in today's comments. Came across a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to browse and edit your S3 structure. It's almost an end-user thing (add a Godaddy account for domain mapping and you're there). Net-net, I couldn't use it to host scripting.com because there's no concept of a default file. Seems like such a small thing. However, I should be able to use it to offload a bunch of my static storage.

4:44PM: I'm moving over my first website to Amazon, an old static store, with early podcasts from the original crew, myself, Dawn & Drew and Adam Curry. We had big plans back then. I have a bunch of these sites, and as a result I should be able to retire one of my servers. Saving money, I hope. ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:28 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Dec Feb