How to Host a Static Website on CloudFront With and Without the Www Subdomain?

If you followed the earlier tips on how to host your Octopress blog on either Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudFront, you’ll most likely wonder how to get your blog to be accessible from both http://www.mywebsite.com and http://mywebsite.com, that is with or without the www subdomain.

The bad news is that there is no way to define a CNAME on a @ DNS record, so this can’t really be done. This is not really an Amazon CloudFront restriction but more a DNS one. You have to use a A record, hence give an IP address.

Hopefully, there is at least one solution available (let me know if you are aware of other alternatives) using a service provided by WWWizer. The way it works is to simply set your @ record to be their IP address, that is 174.129.25.170. This can be easily done adding this line into your DNS zone:

@ 10800 IN A 174.129.25.170
``

This redirect all your traffic on ``` http://mywebsite.com  ``` to ``` http://www.mywebsite.com  ``` via an HTTP 301 redirection.