It's really easy to host a static website on AWS. It turns out that it's also dirt cheap, fast, reliable, and massively scalable.

You do this by storing your content in an S3 bucket and configuring that bucket to behave like a website.

It's important to note that we're talking about static content only. This method doesn't work for websites requiring server-side processing or some other backend functionality. WordPress, for example, requires a hypertext preprocessor (PHP), which means you need a fully functional web server to run it. S3 won't interpret PHP pages for you; it will just serve files straight to the browser.

So, why would you want to host a static website in S3? Common scenarios we encounter include the following:

• Simply, your website is completely static and you don't change it very often.
• Your company is launching a new product or service. You're expecting very large numbers of customers to visit a mini-site within a short time period, which is likely to be more traffic than your existing web-hosting environment can handle.
• You need somewhere to host a failover or down-for-maintenance style page that is separate from your existing web-hosting environment: