CNAME to S3 returns the S3 URL

Question

I've setup a static website on S3 under a www.mydomain.com bucket. I also created a CNAME record for it in Namecheap looking like this:

• Type: CNAME Record
• Host: www
• Value: www.mydomain.com.s3-website-ap-southeast1.amazonaws.com

It redirects correctly when I go to www.mydomain.com but the URL being displayed is of S3 and not my domain. If it helps, here's some output from dig:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.mydomain.com.    1177    IN      CNAME   www.mydomain.com.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com.
www.mydomain.com.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com. 60 IN CNAME s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com.
s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com. 5 IN A 54.231.242.137

When I checked the headers from curl, I got a 301.

Answer 1

The reason you see a 301 in your curl is because www.mydomain.com redirects to mydomain.com from the S3 endpoint for www.mydomain.com. This is a common configuration when using S3 for your static website. The question is how do you have mydomain.com configured in your DNS zone at Namecheap? If the browser is displaying the S3 url I can only assume that the root domain is configured as a 301/302 URL redirect record to point to your S3 endpoint. If that is the case I would ask NameCheap if they have any type of "CNAME like" record that will function as a CNAME but will allow you to configure it on your root domain.

Answer 2

Figured it out - in have two buckets in S3 - mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. mydomain.com is where the site is, and I set www.mydomain.com to redirect to mydomain.com.s3-website-ap-southeast1.amazonaws.com... I moved the files to www.mydomain.com and removed the redirect.