# Working with hosted zones
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A hosted zone is a container for records, and records contain information about how you want to route traffic for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains (acme.example.com, zenith.example.com). A hosted zone and the corresponding domain have the same name. There are two types of hosted zones:
+ *Public hosted zones* contain records that specify how you want to route traffic on the internet. For more information, see [Working with public hosted zones](AboutHZWorkingWith.md).
+ *Private hosted zones* contain records that specify how you want to route traffic in an Amazon VPC. For more information, see [Working with private hosted zones](hosted-zones-private.md).