Welcome

A public hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic on the internet for a domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains.

A private hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic for a domain and its subdomains within one or more VPCs that you created with the Amazon VPC service.

See Public and private hosted zones.

By default, each hosted zone that you create gets a different set of four name servers—a different delegation set. If you create a lot of hosted zones, maintaining different delegation sets can be difficult and time consuming. Route 53 lets you create a delegation set that you can reuse with multiple hosted zones. See Reusable delegation sets.

After you create a hosted zone for your domain, such as example.com, you create resource record sets to tell the Domain Name System (DNS) how to route traffic for that domain. See Resource record sets.

You can create complex routing configurations, known as traffic policies, that use weighted, latency, failover, and geolocation resource record sets. You can then associate a traffic policy with a domain name or subdomain name, such as www.example.com, by creating a traffic policy instance. When users submit DNS queries for the domain or subdomain, Route 53 responds based on the traffic policy that you used to create the traffic policy instance. See Traffic policies and Traffic policy instances.

Route 53 health checks monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources. At regular intervals that you specify, Route 53 submits automated requests over the internet to your application, server, or other resource to verify that it's reachable, available, and functional. See Health checks.

When you want to get a new domain name, such as example.com, you can register it with Route 53. You can also transfer the registration for existing domains from other registrars to Route 53. See Domain registration.

You can protect your domain from DNS spoofing or a man-in-the-middle attack, by configuring Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). See DNS—DNSSEC.

You can configure Route 53 to log information about the DNS queries that Route 53 receives, such as the domain or subdomain that was requested, the date and time of the request, and the DNS record type (such as A or AAAA). See Public DNS query logs.

You can also configure Route 53 Resolver to log information about the DNS queries that originate in Amazon VPCs. See Private DNS query logs.

You can configure Route 53 Resolver to forward DNS queries from your VPC to your network or vice versa. DNS queries pass through an outbound endpoint on their way from a VPC to your network, and they pass through an inbound endpoint on their way from your network to a VPC. For outbound queries, rules let you specify the domain names that you want to forward to your network and the IP addresses of the DNS resolvers in your network. See Route 53 Resolver endpoints and Route 53 Resolver rules.

A tag is a label that you assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and a value, both of which you define. You can use tags for a variety of purposes; one common use is to categorize and track your Route 53 costs. See Tags.