Substack URL Doesn't Work Without WWW?

Using an S3 Bucket to Forward to Your Substack Domain

Sep 18, 2024

We’ve had this newsletter going for a little over 2 years now, and one annoying quirk is that Substack doesn’t allow much control over how DNS and forwarding plays with your Substack site. To use a custom domain, you have to purchase that feature. The fee is a one time $50 payment, so I’m good paying for it, but the setup is very basic, and ONLY works for www.yourdomain.com and not yourdomain.com. So when we send people to “edtechirl.com,” they usually tell us they can’t get to it without adding the “www.” Since this isn’t 1994, I wanted to find a way to fix that, so that typing edtechirl.com in the address bar will take you to the desired site. My registrar for this site is AWS and the steps to do this are *NOT* intuitive, so I hope this helps someone in a similar pickle. What we’re basically going to do is create an S3 Bucket in AWS, set it as a static website, and make it redirect your apex domain (i.e., yourdomain.com) to your www. domain that Substack requires (www.yourdomain.com).

Create an S3 Bucket for Redirection

Create a New S3 Bucket

Open the S3 Management Console.
Click on Create bucket.
Name the bucket exactly as your root domain (e.g., edtechirl.com or yourdomain.com — WITHOUT the WWW).
Disable/Uncheck Block all public access (since it’s a public website, you want to not block public access.
Since allowing public access is the number one cause of data breaches due to leaky buckets, you’ll also need to check the box to confirm that this is really what you want to do.

Configure the Bucket for Website Redirection:

Open the bucket settings.
Go to the Properties tab.
Scroll down to Static website hosting and click Edit.
Select the option Redirect requests.
Under Host name, enter www.yourdomain.com (you DO include the www on this one)
Leave the Protocol as none. For HTTPS to work, you’ll need to do some additional configuration in Cloudfront. Since my goal is just for being able to type edtechirl.com into the address bar, I’m not going to worry about this. Since the destination www.edtechirl.com site is https, there isn’t a negative impact from using regular http because it’s only for the redirect.
Save the changes.

Configure Route 53 for Redirection:

Go to the Route 53 Management Console.
In your hosted zone for yourdomain.com, click on Create Record.
Keep the subdomain portion Record name blank to represent the root domain.
Choose Record type as A.
Toggle on the Alias button
In the Route traffic to field, select Alias to S3 website endpoint
Next, In the Choose endpoint, pick the region where you created your bucket
Click in the new seach field that pops up, and your newly created S3 bucket should show up as an option to select
Choose Simple routing and Evaluate Target Health - yes (they’re the defaults)
Click Create records.

Verify the Setup

Once the DNS changes propagate, go to http://yourdomain.com and it should automatically redirect users to www.yourdomain.com. One of my favorite things about AWS for DNS is it propagates very fast, so you should be in business within a minute or two.