Overview
A static website hosted on AWS provides a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient way to deliver web content to a global audience. The reference architecture combines Amazon S3 for storage, CloudFront as the global CDN, ACM for HTTPS certificate management, and Cloudflare for DNS and domain validation.
Purpose of This Guide
The purpose of this guide is to help you configure static website hosting on AWS using:
- Amazon S3 for storing static website assets
- Amazon CloudFront for CDN distribution and edge caching
- AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for HTTPS certificate management
- Cloudflare for DNS hosting and domain validation
This configuration focuses on:
- Custom domain support through Cloudflare DNS
- Secure HTTPS traffic enforcement
- Global performance through CloudFront caching
- A scalable, cost-efficient architecture for static workloads
Intended Audience
This guide is suited for:
- DevOps and cloud engineers
- Platform engineers
- Technical writers documenting cloud deployment processes
- Front-end developers deploying static sites to AWS
Prior experience with AWS is helpful, but not required to follow this guide successfully.
What You Will Build
By the end of this guide, you will have a fully functional static website hosted on AWS with:
- Public access over HTTPS
- Automatic HTTP → HTTPS redirection
- DNS and custom domain routing managed through Cloudflare
- Logging and monitoring enabled for observability
- Optimized CloudFront caching for global performance
Technologies Used
| Service | Role |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Stores and serves static website assets |
| Amazon CloudFront | Delivers content globally via CDN with edge caching |
| AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) | Issues and manages HTTPS certificates for CloudFront |
| Cloudflare DNS | Hosts DNS records and validates the custom domain |