How To Update a Static Photo Site on Amazon S3?

November 12, 2011 8:57 AM

So, I have a little Wordpress site on Media Temple for photos. Nothing else, just photos. No blog posts, no comments, etc. It's occurred to me that it's really a static site. And static sites can be hosted on Amazon S3. I can handle building the site locally and moving it up to S3. But, I'm wondering about updates. It seems to me that if I build a site locally, publish it to S3, that I can do updates by synching S3 with my local file system. Right? Has anyone done this? Are there apps specifically geared to publishing and maintaining sites on S3?
posted by justcorbly to computers & internet (6 answers total)

A coworker of mine has put a fair amount of time into maintaining s3fs, which might be a good option if you happen to run Linux.
posted by brennen at 10:02 AM on November 12, 2011

Have you thought how you will handle the entire domain name thing on S3?
posted by Brian Puccio at 10:04 AM on November 12, 2011

I actually use s3fs every day! It works pretty well. There are some Mac ports, although I haven't found a good working equivalent.

Amazon can do domain hosting for $1/month but it's not easy to set up....I use a free DNS provider for my site and just point it at S3.
posted by miyabo at 10:36 AM on November 12, 2011

good working *Windows* equivalent
posted by miyabo at 10:37 AM on November 12, 2011

Just yesterday saw O'Reilly advertising their "Python and AWS Cookbook" ebook on sale for under $7. There's a section on hosting static sites. The book seems to emphasize use of Boto.
posted by phearlez at 12:55 PM on November 12, 2011

If you're on a Mac, Transmit is great for syncing files between a local folder and an S3 bucket (as well as lots of other things).
posted by davemessina at 4:42 AM on November 14, 2011