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A client of mine has his website domain and hosting with. We'd like to use Amazon CloudFront as CDN, but we don't want to use S3 – we'd like to keep the site files where they are on DreamHost's servers.

I'm pretty sure this is possible, since CloudFront does allow custom origins, and I signed up for CloudFront, but I am unsure how to fill out the form (what to put for origin name, etc...) even after reading the pop-up help. We are on the bellfountain server of DreamHost.

What I've Tried

  • I did see the "create amazon cloudfront distribution not using amazon S3 bucket" question, and that is basically what I am after, but it wasn't specific enough for my needs.
  • I have also tried posting on the CloudFront forum, but that was less than helpful (no one responded after almost a month).
  • I've scoured Amazon's documentation (which is very thorough, I'll admit), but the most detailed information is for users of S3, and the stuff about using a custom domain again wasn't specific enough for me to figure it out. We do not have a paid support plan.
  • I tried chatting with DreamHost support, but they didn't even know what Amazon CloudFront was, and couldn't help me fill in the CloudFront information form. I looked around DreamHost's settings, etc. for things with similar names as what was being requested on the CloudFront form, but couldn't find anything.
heyycap
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Pretty much if you just put in: http://www.yourdomain.com, cloudfront figures out the rest - and you can customize from there if you need/want to - but just doing that one entry, and creating the distribution will setup a cloudfront end-point to serve the files from your external webserver - just make sure you include the 'http://' in front of the url so it can figure out the rest.

E.J. Brennan
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  • It's really that simple? So I don't have to do some ninja scripting to make sure new files get pushed to CloudFront? CloudFront will take care of that automatically? And it doesn't need fancy URLs with server name, etc? – heyycap Jul 19 '18 at 04:52
  • I just tried it and it did fill in a whole bunch of info. A couple things were blank, like origin custom headers, lambda function associations... Do I not need those? – heyycap Jul 19 '18 at 04:59
  • Also my 404.html page error response works great on the *.cloudfront.net domain, but not when I access the domain normally and try to visit a nonexistent page (example.com/foo). – heyycap Jul 19 '18 at 06:02
  • You might need to customize it - the starting point I gave you 'just works', but it by no means will cover all scenarios. – E.J. Brennan Jul 19 '18 at 12:13