Amazon Route 53 Functionality

Amazon Route 53 has a simple web-services interface that lets you get started in minutes. Your DNS records are organized into “hosted zones” that you configure with Route 53’s API. To use Route 53, you simply:

• Subscribe to the service by clicking on the sign-up button on this page.

• Create a hosted zone that can store DNS records for your domain. Upon creating the hosted zone, you receive four Route 53 name servers across four different Top-Level Domains (TLDs) to help ensure a high level of availability.

• Your hosted zone will be initially populated with a basic set of DNS records, including four virtual name servers that will answer queries for your domain. You can add, delete or change records in this set using the AWS Management Console or by calling the ChangeResourceRecordSet API. A list of supported DNS records is available here.

• Inform the registrar with whom you registered your domain name to update the name servers for your domain to the ones associated with your hosted zone.

To transfer your domain from another DNS service to Route 53, you:

• Get a list of your DNS record data for your domain name, generally available in the form of a “zone file” that you can get from your existing DNS provider.

• Follow the four getting started steps listed above.

By following these few simple steps, you’ll be able to set up your DNS entries and have Route 53 answering queries for your web application in just a few minutes. See our Technical Documentation for more detailed information about the Route 53 service and APIs.

Service Highlights

Highly Available and Reliable – Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.

Scalable – Route 53 is designed to automatically scale to handle very large query volumes without any intervention from you.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Route 53 to map your zone apex (mydomain.com versus www.mydomain.com)to your Elastic Load Balancing instance using a feature called Alias record.

Simple – With self-service sign-up, Route 53 can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. You can configure your DNS settings with the AWS Management Console or our easy-to-use API. You can also programmatically integrate the Route 53 API into your overall web application. For instance, you can use Route 53’s API to create a new DNS record whenever you create a new EC2 instance.

Fast – Using a global anycast network of DNS servers around the world, Route 53 is designed to automatically route your users to the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for your end users, as well as low update latency for your DNS record management needs.

Cost-Effective – Route 53 passes on the benefits of AWS’s scale to you. You pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers for each of your domains, at a low cost and without minimum usage commitments or any up-front fees.

Secure – By integrating Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can grant unique credentials and manage permissions for every user within your AWS account and specify who has access to which parts of the Route 53 service.

Flexible – Route 53 offers Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing. This lets you assign weights to your DNS records that specify what portion of your traffic is routed to various endpoints.

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Hosted Zones

$0.50 per hosted zone / month for the first 25 hosted zones
$0.10 per hosted zone / month for additional hosted zones

The monthly hosted zone prices listed above are not prorated for partial months. A hosted zone is charged upon set-up and on the first day of each subsequent month. To allow testing, a hosted zone that is deleted within 12 hours of creation is not charged; however, any queries on that zone will be charged at the rates below.

Standard Queries

$0.500 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.250 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month

Latency Based Routing Queries

$0.750 per million queries – first 1 Billion queries / month
$0.375 per million queries – over 1 Billion queries / month

The query prices listed above are prorated; for instance, a hosted zone with 100,000 standard queries would be charged $0.050 and a hosted zone with 100,000 Latency Based Routing queries would be charged $0.075.

Queries to Alias records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancers are free. These queries are listed as “Intra-AWS-DNS-Queries” on the Amazon Route 53 usage report.

Need more than 100 hosted zones? Please contact us.

The prices above are exclusive of applicable taxes, fees, or similar governmental charges, if any exist, except as otherwise noted.

Resources

Detailed Description

About DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a globally distributed service that is foundational to the way people use the Internet. DNS uses a hierarchical name structure, and different levels in the hierarchy are each separated with a dot ( . ). Consider the domain names www.amazon.com and aws.amazon.com. In both these examples, “com” is the Top-Level Domain and “amazon” the Second-Level Domain. There can be any number of lower levels (e.g., “www” and “aws”) below the Second-Level Domain. Computers use the DNS hierarchy to translate human readable names like www.amazon.com into the IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to one another.

Route 53 is an “authoritative DNS” system. An authoritative DNS system provides an update mechanism that developers use to manage their public DNS names. It then answers DNS queries, translating domain names into IP address so computers can communicate with each other.

The name for our service (Route 53) comes from the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53 and provide answers that route end users to your applications on the Internet. In the future, we will add additional routing capabilities to Route 53 to better help your users find the best way to your website or application.

Working with Amazon Route 53's APIs

Route 53 provides a simple set of APIs that make it easy to create and manage DNS records for your domains. You can call these directly; all this functionality can also be accessed via the AWS Management Console. For a full list of the available Route 53 APIs, please see the Amazon Route 53 API Reference Guide. Some of the most commonly used APIs and their functionality are listed below:

• CreateHostedZone: Creates a new hosted zone to contain your DNS data. After creating a Hosted Zone, you receive four name servers to which you can delegate your domain.
• GetHostedZone: Lists information about a specific hosted zone.
• DeleteHostedZone: Deletes a hosted zone.
• ChangeResourceRecordSets: Populates and edits the DNS resource records in a hosted zone.
• ListResourceRecordSets: Retrieves either all the resource record sets in a hosted zone or filtered by record name and type.

The Amazon Route 53 Global Network

Route 53 uses a global network of DNS servers at a series of world-wide locations to offer you high availability and increased performance. Route 53 uses the following locations:

• Ashburn, VA (2)
  
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  
• Jacksonville, FL
  
• Los Angeles, CA (2)
  
• Miami, FL
  
• New York, NY (2)
  
• Newark, NJ
  
• Palo Alto, CA
  
• San Jose, CA
  
• Seattle, WA
  
• South Bend, IN
  
• St. Louis, MO
  

• Amsterdam
  
• Dublin
  
• Frankfurt (2)
  
• London (2)
  
• Milan
  
• Paris
  
• Stockholm
  

• Hong Kong
  
• Osaka
  
• Tokyo
  
• Singapore (2)
  

• Sao Paulo
  

Paying for What You Use

With Route 53, you don’t have to pay any upfront fees or commit to the number of queries the service answers for your domain. Like other Amazon Web Services, you pay as you go, and only for what you use:

• Managing a domain You pay a monthly charge for each hosted zone managed with Route 53.

• Serving DNS queries You incur charges for every DNS query answered by the Amazon Route 53 service, except for queries to Alias A records that are mapped to Elastic Load Balancing instances which are provided at no additional charge.

Your monthly bill from AWS will list your total usage and dollar amount for the Amazon Route 53 service separately from other AWS services.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.