[bad_user]

The whole reason why I preferred this setup and not straight hosting on GitHub Pages (which works great for low-traffic content) is that I want control. Control means also adding dynamic behavior when you need it.

A pure static solution like Cloudfront doesn't allow dynamic behavior. One incredibly useful use-case is having redirects, because your content moved around, after a cleanup, or a migration, or something. HTTP redirects are useful for moving the Google juice you received on your original link, doing Javascript-redirects does not work in the same way.

So I like the idea of a static site, but sometimes you really need dynamic behavior. Also, I hate the www. prefix for some reason. I think it is obsolete. It's just an opinion, but I hate that Google's App Engine or Cloudfront doesn't let me go naked.

The problem is that the DNS RFC (RFC1033) requires the "zone apex" (the naked domain) to be an "A Record," not a CNAME. And these services insist on CNAME. It is understandable why, because CNAMEs scale better and a CDN (for instance) couldn't function properly with A records, but I hate this situation it nonetheless. In my view, root domains should be used naked, not with the "www." prefix.

[masnick]

Fair enough. Actually, today I sort of wanted redirects so I could change some URLs on my S3-hosted blog.

Another easier solution to this would be hosting with a service like http://nearlyfreespeech.net. They're pay-by-usage like AWS, but you get full Apache config abilities + dynamic pages if you need them.