Once you’ve created your bucket (in our case, ‘’), the URL for that bucket is which also translates to (this assumes that somebody else hasn’t already used the bucket name you selected). Step 2: Setup your DNSĪmazon encourages you to use their Route53 service for DNS hosting and to setup an ‘A’ record, but it was much easier for us to setup a CNAME record and we already have a DNS solution. This will NOT by itself make the bucket appear at ‘’, but it is a required part of the puzzle. This needs to be the exact hostname you’re using. However, if you want to have an S3 bucket that is accessible at ‘’, when you create your bucket you have to name it ‘’. Go to the S3 console and click ‘Create Bucket’. Setting up an S3 bucket is easy, but doing so in a way that allows us to use our own custom hostname is not at all obvious and a bit frustrating, though easy to implement.

Step 1: Setup an S3 bucket that is named with your complete hostname I won’t detail how to setup a basic AWS account with the billing etc, so if you haven’t done so you’ll need to go to their site and do so. I was able to string together what we wanted from documentation from several different places, however. Amazon has lots of sample policies and examples, but not for this particular case. What we wanted was an S3 bucket that would be available at a specific hostname – lets call it ‘’ – where a small group of editorial people could upload mp3 files, and for those mp3 files to be publically available via http requests. It was much harder than we expected, mostly because the documentation was confusing and scattered. We recently needed to setup a podcast hosting solution with our own hostname, and we chose to use an AWS S3 bucket.

Cyberduck s3 select folder