The Overview
Route53 -> CloudFront -> github.io
You’ll get the joys of having SSL/TLS on a custom domain https://danielx.net backed by the ease of deployment and reliability of GitHub Pages.
The Price
- Route 53 ($0.50)
- CloudFront (pennies!)
- SSL/TLS Cert (free!)
The Details
Get the certificate for your domain at https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/. Be sure your contact details on the domain are up to date because Amazon uses whois info to find out where to send the confirmation email. I like to request a certificate for the wildcard as well as the base domain, i.e. *.danielx.net
and danielx.net
, that way I can use the same certificate if I want to have other CloudFront distributions for subdomains.

You’ll need to click through the links Amazon emails you so that they can validate your ownership of the domain and activate the certificate.
Next, create your CloudFront distribution. Choose “Web”. Configure your origin, in my case strd6.github.io. Choose “HTTPS Only” for Origin protocol policy, that way CloudFront will only connect to you GitHub pages over HTTPS.

Configure the caching behavior. Here I add OPTIONS to the allowed requests, I’m not sure if this is necessary since GitHub pages enables CORS by adding the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
header to all responses. You also may want to customize and set the default TTL to zero. GitHub sets a 10 minute caching header on all resources found, but won’t set a header on 404s. This will prevent CloudFront from caching a 404 response for 24 hours (yikes!)

Here’s where we add our certificate. Be sure to set up the CNAME field with your domain, and be sure your certificate matches!
You’ll also want to set the Default Root Object to index.html
.

You can also add logging if you’re feeling into it.
If your domain is hosted somewhere else you can transfer your DNS to Route53, otherwise you can set up the DNS records on your domain provider.
Create a Route53 Record set for your domain then create an A record. Choose Alias, and select the CloudFront Distribution as your Alias target. Note: you may need to wait ~10-15 minutes for the distribution to juice up.

Caveats
You need to be careful with your urls (you’re careful with them anyway, right?!). You must include the trailing slash like https://danielx.net/editor/
, because if you don’t and do https://danielx.net/editor
GitHub will respond with a 301 Redirect to your .github.io domain, and it won’t even keep the https!
If you hit a 404 CloudFront may cache the response for up to 24 hours with its default settings. This is because GitHub doesn’t set and caching headers on 404 responses and CloudFront does its default thing.