Internet-Experts-Live

Amazon S3 for Static Websites?

By Karl in SEO

Amazon

Amazon S3 sent me a message about their new hosting for static websites offer. I have posted excerpts of the message below along with my thoughts about the offer:

“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…

With these new features, Amazon S3 now provides a simple and inexpensive way to host your website in one place. 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.”

While this sounds great on the surface – my videos, images and websites all in one place my questions are:

• Does the offer include blogs as well?
  Since blogs (WordPress especially) have become so important for online marketing I would be more interested in Amazon’s new offer if they included blogs for hosting.
• What kind of support can we count on?
  The deciding factor on choosing a host for me these days is whether the host has great customer service support (not just sales support). In the life of a website or a blog there are a number of instances where we need to be able to get questions answered and issues taken care of fast. This is especially important if we are acting on behalf of a client.

  One big difference in hosting is the support of WordPress installations. We recently had to move a couple of websites from http://www.1and1.com since they have there own blogging platform, give you only limited space for your WordPress blog and do not help you with any problems you might get with your WordPress blog. That is the reason we moved the websites with their WordPress blogs to http://www.hostgator.com despite a small local hosting disadvantage. Hostgator so far has provided great support for the WordPress installations even when it was outside the scope of their usual range of support.

  Other factors to decide which host to choose such as price and outage times are very similar now and they don’t influence our decisions greatly.

Hope this helps.

Karl

Tags: amazon aws, amazon ec2, amazon s3, ec2, failure, load balancing, outage, performance, problems, programming, s3, san, virtual machines, virtual server, virtualization, web 2.0