Site Builder Documentation
A step-by-step walk-through of making your own storage on Amazon's website, so the pictures and videos on your site are kept in a place you own, under your own account.
This is yours, not ours. You make the storage on your own Amazon account, in your own name, and you tell this site builder how to reach it. Your files sit in your storage, you can see them any time, and if you ever leave they stay with you.
It is the same arrangement as taking card payments here: that uses your own Stripe account, and this uses your own Amazon one.
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On Amazon Web Services — aws.amazon.com
Amazon rents out storage space by the month, for very little money, and anybody can open an account and use it. You are going to make one place in that storage that belongs to you, and let this site builder put your pictures and videos into it.
Four names you will see on Amazon's website, in plain words:
Three kinds of file, one bucket
Your logo, the picture behind a heading, the background of a section or a button. Small, and there are many of them.
The photograph of each thing you sell. Bigger, because they need to stay sharp when somebody looks closely.
Much bigger than either of the above. One video can be larger than every picture on your site put together, which is the real reason this storage is worth having.
What Amazon charges. You pay for how much you keep and how much is sent out to visitors. Both are charged by the gigabyte, and both are cents rather than dollars at the size of one small business website. An empty bucket costs nothing at all.
Amazon asks for a card when you open the account, and they do charge it, so this is a real bill in your name — a small one, but yours. Set a billing alert while you are in there if that would let you sleep better.
aws.amazon.com → Create an AWS Account
Skip this part if you already have one. An ordinary Amazon shopping account is not the same thing, so you probably need to do this even if you buy from Amazon every week.
Use a business email you will still have in five years, not a personal one you might stop using.
Amazon takes a small amount and refunds it, to check the card is real.
The free plan is the right one. You can change it later if you ever need to.
This account will hold your website's files and a card. Two-step sign-in means a stolen password alone is not enough to get in.
This is the one part people get stuck on
A bucket name has to be unlike every other bucket name in the world, not just unlike yours. Short, obvious names such as "photos" or "media" were taken years ago. A name can never be changed afterwards, so choose it once and write it down.
So "Hill Street Bakery" becomes hill-street-bakery-media-4417. The four numbers are what make it unlike anybody else's.
No capital letters, no spaces, no underscores. Amazon refuses those.
You will type this same name into three different places, and they all have to match exactly.
Everywhere below that says your-bucket-name, type your own name instead. Nothing will work if the one in the permission does not match the one on the bucket, letter for letter.
console.aws.amazon.com → S3
Type S3 into the search box at the top and pick it from the list.
If Amazon says the name is already taken, change the four numbers at the end and try again. That is all that is wrong.
If most of them are in the United States, US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 is the usual choice. Write down which one you picked; you will need it at the end.
This matters. It means nobody can go rummaging through your storage directly. The delivery service in the next part gets its own permission to read, and that is the only way in.
console.aws.amazon.com → CloudFront
This is what makes your pictures load quickly for somebody on the other side of the country. You can skip it and come back later; everything else works without it.
Distribution is simply Amazon's word for one of these delivery setups.
Origin means where the real files are kept.
This is what lets the delivery service read a bucket that is otherwise shut to everybody.
A yellow bar appears saying the bucket policy needs updating, with a Copy policy button. Click it, go back to your bucket, open the Permissions tab, edit Bucket policy, paste, and save. That one policy says the delivery service may read your files, and says nothing about anybody else.
It looks like d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net. You will need it at the end. A new one says Deploying for a few minutes, which is normal.
console.aws.amazon.com → IAM
This is the careful part, and it is worth going slowly. You are about to give this site builder a key to your Amazon account. The permission below means that key can put a file into your one bucket, read one back, and delete one — and absolutely nothing else, anywhere.
easy-life-sites.So that a year from now it is obvious what this is and where it is used.
This user is for a program, not a person. It never needs to sign in anywhere.
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"s3:PutObject",
"s3:GetObject",
"s3:DeleteObject"
],
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name/*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "s3:ListBucket",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name"
}
]
}easy-life-sites-media and create it.What that permission really says, in order: put a file in, read a file back, delete a file, and list what is in there — and only inside the one bucket you named. It cannot make or delete buckets, cannot open any other bucket, cannot see your bill, cannot change your account, and cannot spend your money. If that key were ever stolen, that list is the whole of what a thief could do with it.
console.aws.amazon.com → IAM → Users → easy-life-sites
That is what this site builder is, as far as Amazon is concerned.
There is an access key ID, starting with AKIA, and a secret access key. Amazon shows the secret once and never again.
It is a password. Do not email it, do not put it in a message, do not save it in a document. The only place it goes is the settings box in the next part.
Your own account page here → the storage card
Four things go in, and then you are finished.
Exactly as you typed it on Amazon.
The one you chose when you made the bucket, such as us-east-1.
The d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net name. Leave it empty if you skipped that part.
The secret is stored the way a password is stored, and is never shown back to you or to anybody else. Saving it is the last step: from that moment, everything you upload goes into your own storage.
Pictures you uploaded before today carry on working exactly as they did. Nothing already on your site moves or breaks.
The four things that actually go wrong
Somebody in the world has that name. Change the four numbers at the end and try again.
Nearly always the bucket name in the permission does not match the real bucket name. Open the policy and compare them letter for letter.
The delivery service is probably still saying Deploying, which takes a few minutes. Wait, then load the page again.
Clear the settings on your account page here and the site builder goes back to keeping your files the way it did before. Your bucket and everything in it stays exactly where it is, untouched, because it is yours.