How do I to forward example.com to www.example.com at godaddy for s3 hosted site?

Question

I have:

1. signed up for an AWS account
   
2. set up buckets for example.com and www.example.com
   
3. enabled website settings in properties for each domain
   
4. set bucket policies for both domains
   
5. created this cname record:
   www > www.example.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Right now when a user goes to www.example.com, they see the index page, and everything is working just fine. When they go to example.com, there is nothing but darknenss and silence because the page just doesn't load (and gives 'connection timeout' error. )

What I want is for example.com to forward to www.example.com so that no matter what the user types in the browser, they see the site that is located at www.example.com.

• How do I make this work?
  
• Can I add a record of some kind at godaddy to make example.com redirect to www.example.com?
  
• Do I have to get a static IP to make this work using s3? I keep reading about an elastic IP from EC2, but I am not understanding how I can set that up, or how it would work since I am not using EC2 at all for my website.

Answer 1

I think user Go Daddy's answer was correct, but I'll write up more succinct instructions that I followed to get the forwarding to work for me. I don't know why others are suggesting wwwizer, because GoDaddy uses a 301-redirect too (but maybe it didn't used to?). By the way, this answer isn't specific to Amazon's S3 -- it simply requires you have the "www" CNAME record set correctly.

1. Login to GoDaddy.com.
2. Click on My Account.
3. Click on the Domains product, and click the Launch button next to your domain.
4. In the Domain Information section you should see "Forwarding: Off". Click the Manage link next to it.
5. A Forwarding and Masking dialog box should come up. Under Forward example.COM to enter www.example.com.
6. Click the OK button.

The forwarding kicked in for me within maybe half an hour.

To note, in the dialog box you can change it to forward either "http://" or "https://". I only needed it for "http://", so I'm not sure if GoDaddy will forward both SLL and non-SSL at the same time.

Also, if you're curious, if you click on the Advanced Options link in the Forwarding and Masking dialog box, it should be defaulted to "Forward Only" and have the redirect type set to permanently forward your domain (which is what gives the 301-redirect).