How to use Amazon Cloudfront CDN with a website hosted on DreamHost (without S3)

Question

A client of mine has his website domain and hosting with. We'd like to use Amazon CloudFront as CDN, but we don't want to use S3 – we'd like to keep the site files where they are on DreamHost's servers.

I'm pretty sure this is possible, since CloudFront does allow custom origins, and I signed up for CloudFront, but I am unsure how to fill out the form (what to put for origin name, etc...) even after reading the pop-up help. We are on the bellfountain server of DreamHost.

What I've Tried

• I did see the "create amazon cloudfront distribution not using amazon S3 bucket" question, and that is basically what I am after, but it wasn't specific enough for my needs.
• I have also tried posting on the CloudFront forum, but that was less than helpful (no one responded after almost a month).
• I've scoured Amazon's documentation (which is very thorough, I'll admit), but the most detailed information is for users of S3, and the stuff about using a custom domain again wasn't specific enough for me to figure it out. We do not have a paid support plan.
• I tried chatting with DreamHost support, but they didn't even know what Amazon CloudFront was, and couldn't help me fill in the CloudFront information form. I looked around DreamHost's settings, etc. for things with similar names as what was being requested on the CloudFront form, but couldn't find anything.

Answer 1

Pretty much if you just put in: http://www.yourdomain.com, cloudfront figures out the rest - and you can customize from there if you need/want to - but just doing that one entry, and creating the distribution will setup a cloudfront end-point to serve the files from your external webserver - just make sure you include the 'http://' in front of the url so it can figure out the rest.