DNS is a globally distributed service that translates human-readable names like www.example.com into numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. The Internet’s DNS system works much like a phone book by managing the mapping between names and numbers. For DNS, the names are domains (www.example.com) that are easy to remember, and the numbers are IP addresses (192.0.2.1) that specify the location of computers on the Internet. DNS servers translate name requests into IP addresses and control which server an end user reaches when they type a domain name into their web browser. These requests are called “queries.”

Amazon Route 53 makes the Domain Name System (DNS), domain name registration, and web health check services highly available and scalable. It is designed to provide developers and businesses with a highly reliable and cost-effective way to translate names like example.com into the numeric IP addresses, such as 192.0.2.1, that computers use to connect to each other. You can combine your DNS with health check services to direct traffic to healthy endpoints or monitor and alert endpoints independently. You can also purchase and manage domain names like example.com and automatically configure DNS settings for your domains. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running on AWS—such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets—and can also be used to direct users to infrastructure outside of AWS.

With Amazon Route 53, you can create and manage your public DNS records. Like a phone book, Route 53 lets you manage the IP addresses listed for your domain names in the Internet DNS phone book. Route 53 also responds to requests to translate specific domain names to their corresponding IP addresses, such as 192.0.2.1. You can use Route 53 to create DNS records for a new domain or to transfer DNS records for an existing domain. Route 53’s simple, standards-based REST API allows you to easily create, update, and manage DNS records. Route 53 also provides health checks to monitor the health and performance of your application, as well as web servers and other resources. You can also register new domain names or transfer existing domain names to be managed by Route 53.

Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The globally distributed nature of DNS servers helps ensure consistent ability to route end users to your application, bypassing any Internet or network-related issues. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of reliability required by mission-critical applications. Using a global network of DNS servers around the world, Route 53 is designed to automatically respond to requests from the optimal location, depending on network conditions. As a result, the service provides low lookup latency for your end users.

To provide a fully available service, each Amazon Route 53 hosted zone is served by its own set of virtual DNS servers. Therefore, the DNS server names for each hosted zone are determined by the system when that hosted zone is created.

Domain is a general DNS concept. Domain names are easily identifiable for Internet resources that are addressed numerically. For example, amazon.com is a domain. A hosted zone is an Amazon Route 53 concept. A hosted zone is similar to a traditional DNS zone file. It is a collection of records that can be managed together, owned by a parent domain name. All resource record sets in a hosted zone must have the domain name of the hosted zone as a suffix. For example, the hosted zone amazon.com might have records named www.amazon.com and www.aws.amazon.com, but no record named www.amazon.ca. You can use the Route 53 Management Console or the API to create, inspect, modify, and delete hosted zones. You can also use the management console or API to register new domains and transfer existing domain names to Route 53 management.

You can control administrative access to your Amazon Route 53 hosted zone using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. AWS IAM lets you control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records by creating multiple users and managing the permissions of each of these users in your AWS account. Learn more about AWS IAM here.

Yes. The Amazon Route 53 SLA provides service credit if the customer provides monthly credit in each billing cycle under our service commitment. More information can be found here.

Hosted regions are billed once when created and then on the first day of each month.

Hosted zones have a 12-hour grace period – if you delete a hosted zone after 12 hours of creation, we will not charge you for the hosted zone. After the grace period ends, we will immediately charge you the standard monthly fee for the hosted zone. If you create a hosted zone on the last day of the month (for example, January 31), the January cost may appear on your February invoice along with the February cost.

You can configure Amazon Route 53 to log information about the queries that Amazon Route 53 receives, including the timestamp, domain name, query type, location, and so on. You use the Cloud Watch Logs tool to access search reports.