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Amazon Simple Storage Service
Developer Guide (API Version 2006-03-01)

AWS Documentation » Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) » Developer Guide » Making Requests » Making Requests Using the REST API » Virtual Hosting of Buckets
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Virtual Hosting of Buckets

In general, virtual hosting is the practice of serving multiple websites from a single web server. One way to differentiate sites is by using the apparent hostname of the request instead of just the path name part of the URI. An ordinary Amazon S3 REST request specifies a bucket by using the first slash-delimited component of the Request-URI path. Or, you can use Amazon S3 virtual hosting to address a bucket in a REST API call by using the HTTP Host header. In practice, Amazon S3 interprets Host as meaning that most buckets are automatically accessible (for limited types of requests) at http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com. Furthermore, by naming your bucket after your registered domain name and by making that name a DNS alias for Amazon S3, you can completely customize the URL of your Amazon S3 resources, for example, http://my.bucketname.com/.

Besides the attractiveness of customized URLs, a second benefit of virtual hosting is the ability to publish to the "root directory" of your bucket's virtual server. This ability can be important because many existing applications search for files in this standard location. For example, favicon.ico, robots.txt, crossdomain.xml are all expected to be found at the root.

Currently Amazon S3 supports virtual hosted-style and path-style access in all Regions but this will be changing (see the following Important note.) The path-style syntax requires that you use the Region-specific endpoint when attempting to access a bucket. For example, if you have a bucket called mybucket that resides in the EU (Ireland) Region, you want to use path-style syntax, and the object is named puppy.jpg, the correct URI is http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/mybucket/puppy.jpg.

You will receive an HTTP response code 307 Temporary Redirect error and a message indicating what the correct URI is for your resource if you try to access a bucket outside the US East (N. Virginia) Region with path-style syntax that uses either of the following:

  • http://s3.amazonaws.com

  • An endpoint for a Region different from the one where the bucket resides. For example, if you use http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com for a bucket that was created in the US West (N. California) Region.

Important

Buckets created after September 30, 2020, will support only virtual hosted-style requests. Path-style requests will continue to be supported for buckets created on or before this date. For more information, see Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story.

If you use the US East (N. Virginia) endpoint (s3.amazonaws.com) instead of the Region-specific endpoint (for example, s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com), Amazon S3 routes any virtual hosted–style requests to the US East (N. Virginia) Region by default. When you create a bucket in any Region that was launched before March 20, 2019, Amazon S3 updates the DNS to reroute the request to the correct location, which might take time. In the meantime, the default rule applies and your virtual hosted–style request goes to the US East (N. Virginia) Region. Amazon S3 then redirects it with an HTTP 307 redirect to the correct Region.

For S3 buckets in Regions launched after March 20, 2019, the DNS doesn't route your request directly to the AWS Region where your bucket resides. It returns an HTTP 400 Bad Request error instead.

For more information, see Request Redirection and the REST API.

When using virtual hosted–style buckets with SSL, the SSL wild-card certificate only matches buckets that do not contain periods. To work around this, use HTTP or write your own certificate verification logic.

HTTP Host Header Bucket Specification

As long as your GET request does not use the SSL endpoint, you can specify the bucket for the request by using the HTTP Host header. The Host header in a REST request is interpreted as follows:

  • If the Host header is omitted or its value is 's3.amazonaws.com', the bucket for the request will be the first slash-delimited component of the Request-URI, and the key for the request will be the rest of the Request-URI. This is the ordinary method, as illustrated by the first and second examples in this section. Omitting the Host header is valid only for HTTP 1.0 requests.

  • Otherwise, if the value of the Host header ends in '.s3.amazonaws.com', the bucket name is the leading component of the Host header's value up to '.s3.amazonaws.com'. The key for the request is the Request-URI. This interpretation exposes buckets as subdomains of s3.amazonaws.com, as illustrated by the third and fourth examples in this section.

  • Otherwise, the bucket for the request is the lowercase value of the Host header, and the key for the request is the Request-URI. This interpretation is useful when you have registered the same DNS name as your bucket name and have configured that name to be a CNAME alias for Amazon S3. The procedure for registering domain names and configuring DNS is beyond the scope of this guide, but the result is illustrated by the final example in this section.

Examples

This section provides example URLs and requests.

Example Path Style Method

This example uses johnsmith.net as the bucket name and homepage.html as the key name.

The URL is as follows:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/johnsmith.net/homepage.html

The request is as follows:

GET /johnsmith.net/homepage.html HTTP/1.1
Host: s3.amazonaws.com

The request with HTTP 1.0 and omitting the host header is as follows: 

GET /johnsmith.net/homepage.html HTTP/1.0

For information about DNS-compatible names, see Limitations. For more information about keys, see Keys.

Example Virtual Hosted–Style Method

This example uses johnsmith.net as the bucket name and homepage.html as the key name.

The URL is as follows:

http://johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com/homepage.html

The request is as follows:

GET /homepage.html HTTP/1.1
Host: johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com

The virtual hosted–style method requires the bucket name to be DNS-compliant.

Example Virtual Hosted–Style Method for a Bucket in a Region Other Than US East (N. Virginia) Region

This example uses johnsmith.eu as the name for a bucket in the EU (Ireland) Region and homepage.html as the key name.

The URL is as follows:

http://johnsmith.eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/homepage.html

The request is as follows:

GET /homepage.html HTTP/1.1
Host: johnsmith.eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

Instead of using the Region-specific endpoint, you can also use the US East (N. Virginia) Region endpoint no matter what Region the bucket resides in. 

http://johnsmith.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/homepage.html

The request is as follows:

GET /homepage.html HTTP/1.1
Host: johnsmith.eu.s3.amazonaws.com

Example CNAME Method

This example uses www.johnsmith.net as the bucket name and homepage.html as the key name. To use this method, you must configure your DNS name as a CNAME alias for bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com.

The URL is as follows:

http://www.johnsmith.net/homepage.html

The example is as follows:

GET /homepage.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.johnsmith.net

Customizing Amazon S3 URLs with CNAMEs

Depending on your needs, you might not want "s3.amazonaws.com" to appear on your website or service. For example, if you host your website images on Amazon S3, you might prefer http://images.johnsmith.net/ instead of http://johnsmith-images.s3.amazonaws.com/.

The bucket name must be the same as the CNAME. So http://images.johnsmith.net/filename would be the same as http://images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com/filename if a CNAME were created to map images.johnsmith.net to images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com.

Any bucket with a DNS-compatible name can be referenced as follows: http://[BucketName].s3.amazonaws.com/[Filename], for example, http://images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com/mydog.jpg. By using CNAME, you can map images.johnsmith.net to an Amazon S3 hostname so that the previous URL could become http://images.johnsmith.net/mydog.jpg.

The CNAME DNS record should alias your domain name to the appropriate virtual hosted–style hostname. For example, if your bucket name and domain name are images.johnsmith.net, the CNAME record should alias to images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com. 

images.johnsmith.net CNAME 			images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com.

Setting the alias target to s3.amazonaws.com also works, but it may result in extra HTTP redirects.

Amazon S3 uses the hostname to determine the bucket name. For example, suppose that you have configured www.example.com as a CNAME for www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com. When you access http://www.example.com, Amazon S3 receives a request similar to the following: 

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Date: date
Authorization: signatureValue

Amazon S3 sees only the original hostname www.example.com and is unaware of the CNAME mapping used to resolve the request. So the CNAME and the bucket name must be the same.

Any Amazon S3 endpoint can be used in a CNAME. For example, s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com can be used in CNAMEs. For more information about endpoints, see Request Endpoints.

To associate a hostname with an Amazon S3 bucket using CNAMEs

  1. Select a hostname that belongs to a domain you control. This example uses the images subdomain of the johnsmith.net domain.

  2. Create a bucket that matches the hostname. In this example, the host and bucket names are images.johnsmith.net.

    Note

    The bucket name must exactly match the hostname.

  3. Create a CNAME record that defines the hostname as an alias for the Amazon S3 bucket. For example:

    images.johnsmith.net CNAME images.johnsmith.net.s3.amazonaws.com

    Important

    For request routing reasons, the CNAME record must be defined exactly as shown in the preceding example. Otherwise, it might appear to operate correctly but eventually results in unpredictable behavior.

    Note

    The procedure for configuring DNS depends on your DNS server or DNS provider. For specific information, see your server documentation or contact your provider.

Limitations

Virtual host URLs are supported for non-SSL (HTTP) requests only.

Note

SOAP support over HTTP is deprecated, but it is still available over HTTPS. New Amazon S3 features will not be supported for SOAP. We recommend that you use either the REST API or the AWS SDKs.

Backward Compatibility

Early versions of Amazon S3 incorrectly ignored the HTTP Host header. Applications that depend on this undocumented behavior must be updated to set the Host header correctly. Because Amazon S3 determines the bucket name from Host when it is present, the most likely symptom of this problem is to receive an unexpected NoSuchBucket error result code.