Redirecting a domain to an external URL

Question

Probably a noob question, but please forgive my sudden loss of google-fu. With a domain hosted on Route 53, is there a cheap and reliable (ie set it up once and not need to touch it until the redirect target changes) way to redirect to an external URL (a Google Scholar profile page)?

S3 buckets seem to have a redirect facility (under Static Website Hosting), but it doesn't work for me. I guess that's only good for redirecting to a domain, but I need an exact URL. Do I need Cloudfront, and would the cost be prohibitive? This will be very low-traffic.

I'd like to use a https connection, so that visitors are just bounced seamlessly to the Scholar page with no browser warnings.

Paul_L · Accepted Answer

I think CloudFront would be a good fit for this - it will provide the lowest latency for your users as the redirect will be served from their nearest Point of Presence (POP), and the volume of traffic should be low enough to fit into the [free tier](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/).

There are a number of ways you could set this up, but I think the simplest would be to put an index.html into an S3 bucket, and serve that through CloudFront. This is outlined in detail [here](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/cloudfront-serve-static-website/). Your index.html should simply redirect the user to the target URL. If it is unlikely to change, then you can set long [TTL values in CloudFront ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Expiration.html )to maximize the number of requests that will be served from cache.

Note that Origin Access Identities specified in the article linked above have been superseded by [Origin Access Control ](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/amazon-cloudfront-introduces-origin-access-control-oac/).

Redirecting a domain to an external URL

Relevant content