Initially S3 was , such as movies, in which case S3 is both cheaper and faster than most Web hosting providers. Hosting other files such as images was initially problematic because of latency issues (that is, a delay between a browser requesting a file, and receiving it). This was addressed when S3 introduced more data centers worldwide and better load balancing.

However, until now it's been impossible to host entire Websites at S3 because there was no way to define root and error documents within an S3 ‘bucket' (a bucket being the name given to individual storage configurations).

In other words, there was no way to configure S3 to serve index.html when visitors were directed to an S3 bucket, and no way to serve something like error.html if something went wrong.

. Root and error documents can now be defined for each bucket, although there are a handful of important caveats.

Firstly, because S3 is just dumb storage, hosting an entire site is only possible for entirely static content--that is, nothing more than HTML files, images, and so on. Anybody wanting to utilize PHP or similar will or a standard hosting provider. That means you couldn't host something like a WordPress blog at S3, for example.