You can use Amazon Route53 to register new domains, transfer existing domains, route traffic for your domains to your AWS and external resources, and monitor the health of your resources.
Route53 performs 3 main functions
Register a domain
As a DNS, it routes internet traffic to the resources for your domain.
Check the health of your Resources.
Route53 sends automated requests over the internet to a resource (it can be a web server) to verify that the server is reachable, functional, or available.
Also, you can choose to receive notifications when the resource becomes unavailable and choose to route internet traffic away from unhealthy resources.
You can use Route53 for any combination of these functions.
e.g. you can use Route53 both to register your domain name and to route internet traffic for the domain.
You can use Route53 to route Internet traffic for a domain that you registered with another domain registrar.
When you register a domain with Route53 the service automatically makes itself the DNS service for the domain by doing the following
- It creates a hosted zone that has the same name as your domain.
- It assigns a set of 4 name servers to the hosted zones, unique to the account.
When someone uses a browser to access your website, these name servers inform the browser where to find your resources, such as a web server or an Amazon S3 bucket.
It gets the name servers from the hosted zone and adds them to the domain.
AWS Supports
Generic Top-level domains
Geographic Top-level domains
Registering a domain with Route53
You can register a domain with Route53 if the TLD(Top-Level Domain) is included on the supported TLD list.
If the TLD is not included, you can't register the domain with Route53.
Using Route53 as your service
You can use Route53 as the DNS service for any domain, even if the TLD for the domain is not included on the supported TLD list.
Each Amazon Route53 account is limited to a maximum of 500 hosted zones and 10,000 resource record sets per hosted zone. You can increase this limit by requesting AWS.
Steps to configure Route53
You need to register a domain, this can be Route53 or any other DNS registrar, but then you connect your domain name to that registrar to Route53.
Create Hosted Zone on Route53, this is cloned automatically if you registered your domain using Route53
- Inside the hosted zone, you need to create Recordsets.
Delegate to Route53
This step connects everything and makes it works.
Connect the domain name to the Route53 hosted zone- This is called delegation.
Update your domain registrar with the correct name servers for your Route53 hosted zone
No other customer-hosted zone will share this delegation set with you.
Doing this means Route53 DNS service will be serving DNS traffic for the domain of the hosted Zone.
If you registered your domain with a different registrar you need to configure the Route53 NS servers list in your registrar DNS Database for your domain.
If you are using another domain provider and you did all the changes
When you migrate from one DNS provider to another, for an existing domain this change can take up to 48 hours to be effective.
This is because name server DNS records are typically cached across the DNS system globally on the internet for up to 48 hours (Time to Live) periods.
Transferring a domain to Route53
You can transfer a domain to Route53 if the TLD is included on the following list.
If the TLD is not included, you can't transfer the domain to Route53
For most of the TLDs, you need an authorization code from the current registrar to transfer a domain.