Amazon’s S3 file storage service started life as just that — a simple way to store static files and pay for only the data you used. When you don’t need an always-on server, S3 fits the bill.

But if you can store static files, why not whole static websites? In 2011 Amazon began allowing you to point your own domain to an S3 “bucket”, a folder in Amazon parlance. Custom domain support made it simple to host entire static sites; the catch was that you needed to use a subdomain — for example, www.

Now the www restriction has been lifted and you can point any root domain at S3 and serve your files directly. The only catch is that Amazon has created its own non-standard DNS workaround, which means you must use Amazon’s Route 53 service to host the DNS data for your domain.

Unfortunately, while the new root domain support is great news for anyone using a static blog generator like Jekyll, Amazon’s documentation leaves much to be desired. To help you get started with S3 hosting, here’s a quick guide to setting up S3 to serve files from a root domain (rather than making the root domain redirect to www.mydomain.com, as the Amazon blog post instructions do).

First, register a domain name and point your DNS records to Amazon’s Route 53 service (the Route 53 docs have detailed instructions on how to do this). The next step is to create an S3 bucket for your domain. In other words, a bucket named mydomain.com.

Now click the Properties button, select the Website tab and make sure that the option is enabled and the Index Document is set to index.html. You’ll also need to click the Permissions tab and set a bucket policy (you can use this basic example from Amazon).

Now upload your site to that bucket and head back to Route 53. Here comes the magic. To make this work you need to create an A “Alias” DNS record. Make sure you name it the same as your domain name. Sticking with the earlier example, that would be mydomain.com. Now click the Alias Target field and select the S3 endpoint you created earlier when you set up the bucket.

And that’s it. Behind the scenes that Route 53 “Alias” record looks like a normal DNS A record. That means things like email will continue to work for your domain and at the same time Route 53 directs requests to your S3 bucket. If you want to make www redirect to the root domain you can either set that up through Route 53 (see Amazon’s instructions) or handle it through another service.