Is it possible to use AWS as a web host?
EDIT: Aug 12, 2016 they have a dedicated section on how to get started hosting a website on AWS. Please note S3 only allows STATIC websites but AWS provides SDKs in case you want to run PHP, ASP.NET, etc on your instance. See the links for more details.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html https://aws.amazon.com/websites/
So guess what I just found while doing some Google searches for hosting on AWS?! A blog post by the AWS stating that you can (now) host a website on S3. (Funny enough, the StackOverflow and the AWS post were right next to each other in the SERPs!)
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-s3.html
Yes it is completely possible to host websites on AWS in 2 ways:
1.) Easy - S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a bucket storage solution that lets you serve static content e.g. images but has recently been upgraded so you can use it to host flat .html files and your site will get served by a default Apache installation with very little configuration on your part (but also little control).
2.) Trickier - You can use EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and create a virtual Linux instance then install Apache/NGinx (or whatever) on that to give you complete control over serving whatever/however you want. You use SecurityGroups to enable/disable ports for individual machines or groups of them.
@danben your EC2 instance does not have a constant public IP by default. Amazon makes you use a CNAME - not an A record as your IP may change under load. You have to pay for an ElasticIP to get a consistent public IP for your setup (or use some sort of DynDNS)
AWS = Amazon Web Services = a suite of different web services.
S3 (which you linked to) is an object store. You can't host a web service on S3.
EC2, also under the AWS umbrella, is virtualized compute space. You CAN host a web service on EC2. It is just like having a server in a rack somewhere, except that when you shut down an instance, it is gone forever. But using EBS, which is like a virtualized hard drive, will prevent you from losing your data when the EC2 instance shuts down.
See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/