How to securely serve S3 files to blog

Question

I'm starting a blog and i'm in the process of choosing where should i host it. For now i want a free solution like Blogger or Wordpress.com.

The problem i'm facing is that i want to use files i have in a S3 bucket in my blog but none of the blog solutions i found supports any kind of server code, which means that in order to use S3 query string authentication i would have to put vulnerable information in the client. For obvious reasons i don't want to do that.

So, i'm looking for ideas on how i can safely include content from S3 in a free blog host.

Answer 1

Im not aware of any blog software that by default supports Amazon S3. So your best shot is to get a cheap hosting (hosting is really cheap these days, a few dollars a month). Then you can install a plugin which supports Amazon S3.

Answer 2

I think we might need a bit more detail here. For example, if you just want to link to files on S3 from your blog, you can make the files globally readable on S3 and then just link to them, with no authentication necessary.

If you want to do something more complex, maybe look into hosting WordPress yourself using WordPress.org, at which point you can use server-side code yourself, perhaps as a plugin. Or, maybe there's an existing plugin that works with WordPress that would suit you -- there's definitely a plug-in which copies WordPress file uploads to S3 and then serves them from there, rather than from your blog host, for example. It's not free a free solution, but hosting starts pretty cheap.

For fairly obvious reasons of security, there aren't any blog service providers I can think of who provide server-side code access.