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As a best practice, use a 'normal' name for your S3 bucket and then put Cloudfront in front of your S3 website.

This way you are not limited by bucket names and you also avoid any SSL validation errors.

Note: you can set Cloudfront's TTL to 0 if you don't need any caching.

This is certainly good practice as long as anyone contemplating this considers the cost implications versus serving from S3 directly.

Good point. It's actually generally cheaper to serve content through Cloudfront instead of S3 directly as bandwidth is less expensive with Cloudfront.

However you are going to pay for Cloudfront requests in addition to S3's. In the vast majority of cases, it's insignificant compared to the savings you can achieve on the bandwidth side. (And at a certain level you can ask AWS to waive CF request fees entirely).

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