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I have an Elastic IP 192.0.2.4 for my EC2 instance for example.

I have a GoDaddy domain name www.example.com for example

I want my domain name www.example.com to load pages from http://192.0.2.4/a_sub_directory/ -- I have two queries about that.

  1. The other forums I browsed through (ServerFault and Quora) suggest I need to re-write the A Host's @ record to the Elastic IP that's connected to my EC2 instance. What if I want the domain name http://www.example.com to load up my page at http://192.0.2.4/a_sub_directory/ instead of the root directory at http://192.0.2.4/?

  2. GoDaddy domain manager has something called "Forwarding with Masking". Can I use that feature to load up my EC2 hosted instance from my GoDaddy domain name INSTEAD of changing any A record or anything?

Community
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Rakib
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  • You can do all sorts of things, but *why* would you want to? Just setup the webserver on your EC2 instance to serve `www.example.com` out of whatever the *actual* docroot is. – womble Jul 05 '12 at 11:49
  • i **DID** setup the webserver on my EC2 instance.......... I am trying to figure out how to connect my GoDaddy domain name with EC2 instances which is **ALREADY** serving my pages globally via elastic IP – Rakib Jul 05 '12 at 12:20

1 Answers1

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  1. Your elastic IP will allow you to have http://1.2.3.4/a_sub_directory/ which can be visited by anyone. However, A records are at the DNS level, they only allow you to point example.com into 1.2.3.4 so you'd have http://example.com/a_sub_directory/ - but it's not possible to remove a_sub_directory from this using DNS alone. You need another system.

  2. Yes, you can use this feature. Just forward/mask your domain onto http://1.2.3.4/a_sub_directory/ without changing any A records and you'll be done.

  3. A better solution would be to use Apache, and have example.com with a DocumentRoot of /var/www/html/a_sub_directory/. This way example.com will load everything from a_sub_directory but it's clean, and the user is none-the-wiser (it's what everyone does). You will need an A Record into 1.2.3.4. This comes from Virtual Hosting which many HTTP servers (Apache, Lighttpd, etc.) deal with very well - so you have example.net and example.com both on 1.2.3.4 but with two different directories serving their content.

It is worthy to note that forwarding/masking is not "clean". You can see the page load, then the frame load inside. Any links inside the masked frame will be of the form http://1.2.3.4/a_sub_directory/images/test.jpg and if a user does a Right Click > Copy Link then they'll get a http://1.2.3.4/a_sub_directory/... link, not example.com.

Jay
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  • by the noteworthy point you mentioned, i understand it's best to re-write the A records to point to my Elastic IP. But the problem is, the root folder of my website is in a **subdirectory** of my AWS instance. Is there anyway i can make this work? – Rakib Jul 05 '12 at 11:40
  • Yes, please see the third point I added. If you are happy configuring Apache, this would be the perfect solution. – Jay Jul 05 '12 at 11:42