

Leaving Wordpress for a Static Blog - heyrhett
http://www.otherlab.com/blog/2013/02/14/leaving-wordpress-for-a-static-blog.html

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byoung2
_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>

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heyrhett
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.

~~~
byoung2
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.

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ckluis
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.

