S3 Static website is automatically redirecting from apex domain to www but can't find where that is configured

Question

I have a static website running using S3, CloudFront, R53, and ACM.  
I would like any http to redirect to https and the root domain to redirect to www in the browser.  
One case does not work and I cannot figure out why.  
Also, I don't remember explicitly configuring anything to redirect root to www but it does this automatically but only when using http.

https://www.example.com - Works  
http://www.example.com - Works (Redirects to https://www.example.com)  
http://example.com - Works (Redirects to https://www.example.com)  
https://example.com - Connection Timeout

**R53:**  
www.example.com CNAME -> CloudFront Distro Url

**CloudFront:**  
Alternate domain names:  
  exmaple.com  
  www.example.com  
Origins: Http Only, S3 bucket  
Behavior: Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

**S3:**  
Bucket name: example.com  
Hosting Type: Host a static website  
  
**AWS Certificate Manager:**  
Domains:  
*.example.com  
example.com

Carlos del Castillo · Accepted Answer

Many browsers today will add www. to your domain when you enter just the domain.com.  That may be why the domain.com works when you do HTTP:// but not when you do https://.

You can validate this by using curl command like so:

`curl HTTP://example.com`

If it returns an error, then this is probably what is happening.

You can follow this tutorial and you can then redirect all HTTP and https traffic for example.com and www.example.com to your S3 bucket as you like.
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/hosting-internal-https-static-websites-with-alb-s3-and-privatelink/

Hope this helps!

rePost-User-7223964 · Answer

Thanks for the help Carlos.

Good call! Yes, it appears the browser was adding www. 
curl works for www but not the root domain, which makes sense now.

I looked at that link and still being very new to AWS, is there another tutorial that instead uses CloudFront?
I'm a bit concerned on the potential cost of all these services just to host a static website when my trail runs out.

I've many many posts that suggest I can redirect root domain to www using an A record alias that points to the CF distro url using Route53 but I have not been able to get that to work.

S3 Static website is automatically redirecting from apex domain to www but can't find where that is configured

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