Have SFTP for the domain resolve to a different host

amazon s3amazon-web-servicesdomain-name-systemsftp

OK, this is probably a really basic DNS question, so sorry…

My small one-person company's domain, mikekellyconsulting.com, is hosted by Web.COM (a/k/a Interland) on a Windows hosting plan. Apparently they don't support SFTP. I need an SFTP site where clients can securely copy large amounts of data (probably 10 – 20 GB per engagement). I want them to be able to use any SFTP client they have.

I've poked around a bit on the web and found some places that will offer SFTP hosting but it seems ridiculously expensive – like $60/month for 10 GB. I'll pay $720 per year if I absolutely have to, but I'm looking at alternatives. I thought about setting up my own Linux server in my office, but that seems like a lot of work for a simple need. Since SFTP seems way easier under Unix than Windows (true?) I figured I'd just set up a Red Hat Linux Server at Amazon Web Services and probably end up paying less than $60 per month – in addition to getting some experience with AWS.

So here's my question: I want the address that people connect to to be sftp.mikekellyconsulting.com (another reason not to use one of the services – I doubt they could offer me this). This is for a professional look, as well as to resolve any concerns about who is controlling the secure FTP site they are copying confidential data to.

My DNS records at Web.COM look like this:

Record              Type    Resolves To      TTL
mikekellyconsulting.com     A   209.237.151.16           1 hour
ftp.mikekellyconsulting.com     CNAME   mikekellyconsulting.com  1 hour        
www.mikekellyconsulting.com     CNAME   mikekellyconsulting.com  1 hour
mikekellyconsulting.com     NS  c.ns.interland.net   1 day         
mikekellyconsulting.com     NS  b.ns.interland.net       1 day         
mikekellyconsulting.com     NS  a.ns.interland.net       1 day

So suppose I get an AWS S3 account – can I just add a DNS record to make it sftp.mikekellyconsulting.com and map it to something on Amazon S3? Has anyone done this? Any gotchas? What would this DNS record look like?

Thanks for any pointers or guidance here.

Best Answer

Amazon S3 does not provide SFTP access. If you want to give users the ability to securely upload and/or download files straight to S3 then it will have to be via HTTPS POST/GET and you'll have to directly use the s3.amazonaws.com domain due to the [wildcard] SSL certificate. For non-SSL requests, you can use CNAMEs and S3 "Virtual Hosting":

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html

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