Websites hosted in Amazon S3 “buckets” always have a default hostname similar to uniquevalue.s3-website-country-region-zonenumber.amazonaws.com. The exact value for your S3 bucket hostname will be provided to you organization as part of the Percussion CM1 SaaS onboarding process. We also recommend that you create a CNAME in your DNS which points to your S3 bucket hostname, such as test.companyname.com while your site is in development. This will help to validate that all services are working properly under your overall domain name prior to your site launch.
It is important to carefully consider what the final hostname for your production site will be, and if you want your website to be a “catch-all” for all unassigned names. For example, setting the “@” value (a wildcard value) as a CNAME in DNS, will insure that visitors will see your site regardless of whether they use companyname.com, www.companyname.com or website.companyname.com. (Assuming those values haven’t been assigned separately in DNS). However, it will also mean your site will load for all other addresses that aren’t specifically assigned elsewhere in DNS, including vulgar words, etc. Generally this is the most common choice, as it ensures that all possible traffic reaches your site.
Setting up DNS prior to Go Live
With our CM1 product we use Amazon Cloudfront to enable SSL for hosted web sites. When setting up Cloudfront you will be provided a url by Percussion that looks simular to the follwing example: d6lcw46vsy656.cloudfront.net
In order to have your website point and resolve correctly follow the steps below.
- Create a CNAME and point it to the cloudfront url that was given to you by Support.
Following the example above will ensure that your www domain will resolve correctly.
Many customers want to have their root domain also resolve to their website (for example have http://customername.com, with no www., in front of it, load the same site as their www. value). To make this work the customer must do the following:
- In your DNS, ensure that the CNAME record was created in the instructions above.
- Create an A records that matches the root domain name (again, something like mydomain.com) and point it to the IP address 174.129.25.170.
This is required because a root domain cannot be a CNAME record, only an A record. The 174.129.25.170 is a special Root domain redirect service that tells the A record to send any requests for the root domain to the same host as has been assigned to the www record CNAME.
Some DNS hosting services use the @ host to control the Root domain. In that case add an A record for @ that points to the 174.129.25.170 address.
Regarding Intranet Services:
Percussion provides the option for you to deploy Intranet websites using CM1 SaaS. This is achieved by restricting access to the site to just your company IP address. In order to implement this, it will be necessary for you to provide a discrete set of external IP ranges so that Percussion can set these values as the only permitted source IPs in the security table for your Amazon S3 bucket.