CNAME in DNS Configuration registrar Bookmyname for S3 static hosting

Question

I am absolutely confused here, so some help would definitly help.

I have a static Website that I want to host on AWS S3. I want to associate it to the sans-titres.com Domain Name (and as a bonus www.sans-titres.com but step by step ...)

I have read this : Static hosting on Amazon S3 - DNS Configuration and followed all the steps.

So I have two buckets www.sans-titres.com and sans-titres.com

The Domain Name is registered at https://www.bookmyname.com and I can't change that.

So I tried to create a CNAME and I thought that would be it. But unfortunately, that doesn't work.

www.sans-titres.com  28800   CNAME   sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.
sans-titres.com  28800   CNAME   sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.

and as a configuration, I still have :

Your DNS :
    nsa.bookmyname.com
    nsb.bookmyname.com
    nsc.bookmyname.com

which I can't modify (at least, I can't change the field to www.sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com or sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.

So first question is : What are the Bookname DNS addresses for ? Since, as I understand the CNAME rule, whenever sans-titres.com is sent, the request is forwarded to the aws one which replies the proper content. So nsa.bookmyname.com should never be reached ?

Second question is naturally : What am I doing wrong ?

I tried to traceroute sans-titres.com, but here's what I have :

Lookup Failed. No IP address or host name with a valid lookup in input.

I also read this : Setting foobar.com and www.foobar.com to point to my Amazon S3–hosted site

which made me think that I should follow this tutorial : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html which explains that we need to use Route53 services, which is not included in S3 services. Don't we have a solution to avoid this ?

I thought Domain Names where super-easy : either you point to an IP, or you point to another address that will point to the IP later, but I happend to discover it's much more complicated than this ...

A great thanks in advance for any help, I am very confused now ...

Answer 1

Finally I got me out of trouble, even though I never really understood what was wrong.

For sure, my CNAME configuration wasn't correct. Here is the one that works now :

    @    28800   A   174.129.25.170
    www  28800   CNAME   www.sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com.

with A redirecting to http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect to add the www.

But there still are some fancy things going around.

Eg. when I type the full amazon end-point : http://www.sans-titres.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

I get redirected to http://www.sans-titres.com, which feels unlogical since it's the other way round, considering the CNAME rule.

Lesson learnt : all these registrars have very unfriendly interfaces, and make you feel very uncomfortable about modifying their configuration, while Amazon tries to sell as many services as possible at once.

Well, gotta be carefull !