Creating hosted zone in AWS for imported domains.
Before going further into the discussion, I assume you’re familiar with AWS’s DNS service, AWS Route53, hosted zones and DNS records.
There’s a little gap of knowledge and knowledge articles when it comes to mapping AWS’s resource with domain that is bought from outside of AWS, such as GoDaddy.com. This article quickly lists the steps involved in matching AWS resources to domain name.
- Login into AWS account and navigate to Route53.
- Choose create Hosted zone.
- Provide a root domain name. We are creating for cubedsteps.com, hence cubedsteps.com
- Select Public Hosted zone, create tags as necessary and click on create hosted zone.
A public hosted zone determines how traffic is routed on the internet.
A private hosted zone determines how traffic is routed within an Amazon VPC.
5. Back in the hosted zone dashboard, we already have our hosted zone. Going inside the hosted zone, we can see that NS records and SOA record have been created by default.
NS stands for ‘nameserver,’ and the nameserver record indicates which DNS server is authoritative for that domain (i.e. which server contains the actual DNS records). Basically, NS records tell the Internet where to go to find out a domain’s IP address. A domain often has multiple NS records which can indicate primary and backup nameservers for that domain. Without properly configured NS records, users will be unable to load a website or application. Updating the primary nameserver will trigger an update of the secondary nameservers as well.
5. Create a A record inside the hosted zone pointing to the IP address or CNAME of Load Balancer or CloudFront as applicable.
6. Copy the NS records of the hosted zone in a notepad.
7. Log into your domain name provider console. Navigate to the section that allows you to change the name servers. Copy the name servers that were copied from AWS Route53 hosted zones.
8. It might take at most 300 seconds to propagate. Your website should be live within 5 minutes.
Ta-da
