Route53 Hosted Zone
A route53 hosted zone is a collection of records for a specified domain.
You create a hosted zone for a domain, and then you create records to tell the domain name system how you want traffic to be routed for that domain.
Basically, a hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic for a domain and its subdomains.
You can create public (internet) hosted zone or a private (Internal DNS) hosted zone
For each public hosted zone that you create Amazon route53 automatically creates a name server (NS) record and a start of authority(SOA) record. You should not change these records.
Route53 automatically creates a name server(NS) record with the same name as your hosted zone.
It lists the four name servers that are the authoritative name servers for your hosted zone.
Do not add, change, or delete name servers in this record.
When you create a hosted zone, amazon route53 automatically creates a name server(NS) record and a start of authority record for the zone.
The NS record identifies the four name servers that you give to your registrar or your DNS service so that DNS queries are routed to route53 name servers.
By default, route53 assigns a unique set of four name servers (known collectively as a Delegation set) to each hosted zone that you create.
e.g.
ns-1337 awsdns-39.com
ns-895 awsdns-47.net
ns-428 awsdns-53.org
ns-1597 awsdns-07.co.uk
Route 53 as your authoritative DNS
Once you update the Route53 NS settings with your domain registrar to include the route53 name servers, route53 will be responsible to respond to DNS Queries for the hosted zone.
This is true whether you do have a functioning website or not.
Route53 will respond with information about the hosted zone whenever someone types the associated domain name in a web browser.
You can create more than one hosted zone with the same name and add different records to each hosted zone.
Route53 assigns 4 name servers to every hosted zone.
The name servers are different for each of them.
When you update your registrar's name server records, be careful to use the route53 name servers for the correct hosted zone. The one that contains the records that you want route53 to use when responding to queries for your domain.
Route53 never returns values for records in other hosted zones that have the same name
Route53 hosted zone default entries
Inside the hosted zone by default, you have 2 entries:-
NS Entry:- Contains the unique sets of name servers for this hosted zone.
SOA Entry:- Contains information about the hosted zone.