How to Select a Region for Your Buckets

Amazon Simple Storage Service: 2006-03-01

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How to Select a Region for Your Buckets

You can choose a geographical region where Amazon S3 will store the buckets you create. For example, if you reside in Europe, you might like to specify that the buckets you create (and therefore the objects stored in them) reside in Europe. You specify a region using the LocationConstraint bucket parameter. If you do not specify a region, Amazon S3 hosts your buckets on servers in the US region. The other region you can constrain a bucket to is EU (Europe).

	Note
	The SOAP API does not support geographical constraints.

Use the following process to specify a bucket's region.

Specifying a Bucket's Region

1	In a bucket creation request, set the `LocationContraint` parameter to a specific region, for example, `CreateBucketConfiguration.LocationConstraint=EU`.

Bucket Access

To access Amazon S3 buckets and objects that were created using CreateBucketConfiguration, you must use the virtual hosted-style request. For example:

http://yourbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/yourobject

You cannot use the path-style request:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/yourbucket/yourobject

If you use the path-style request, you receive a permanent redirect.

Redirection

Amazon supports two types of redirects: temporary and permanent.

Temporary redirects automatically redirect users that do not have DNS information for the requested bucket. This occurs because DNS changes take time to propagate through the Internet. For example, if a user creates a bucket with a location constraint and immediately stores an object in the bucket, information about the bucket might not distribute throughout the Internet. Because the bucket is a sub domain of s3.amazonaws.com, Amazon S3 redirects it to the correct Amazon S3 location.

Permanent redirects redirect users from the path-style request to the virtual hosted-style request format for buckets created using <CreateBucketConfiguration>. Users will be provided with the correct URL, but will not be forwarded to the correct location.

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