What is Amazon Route 53 used for?

Amazon Route 53 is AWS's scalable DNS service, also providing domain registration and health-check based traffic routing. It is a good fit for hosting DNS for AWS-based applications, failing over traffic between regions and routing users to the lowest-latency endpoint.

How much does Amazon Route 53 cost?

Amazon Route 53 is a paid product with no free plan. Pay as you go with no upfront fees: $0.50 per hosted zone per month for the first 25 zones and $0.40 per million standard DNS queries. Traffic Flow policy records cost $50 per month.

Is Amazon Route 53 open source?

No. Amazon Route 53 is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Route 53 include CoreDNS, Technitium DNS Server and PowerDNS.

What are some alternatives to Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 competes with Cloudflare, NS1 and DNSimple. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Route 53 alternatives.

Amazon Route 53: features, pricing and alternatives

About Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is the domain name system service from Amazon Web Services. It translates domain names into IP addresses and is built to be highly available and scalable, so it is commonly used as the authoritative DNS for websites and applications running on AWS or elsewhere.

Besides hosting DNS zones, Route 53 can register domain names and monitor the health of endpoints. Its routing policies let teams steer traffic by factors such as latency, geographic location, weighting or failover, which helps reduce latency and keep applications reachable when a resource fails.

Route 53 is a commercial AWS service charged by usage, aimed at developers and operations teams of any size, and it integrates closely with other AWS services. Pricing is documented on the AWS Route 53 pricing page.

Key features

Authoritative DNS hosting for domains
Domain name registration
Health checks for endpoint monitoring
Latency, geolocation and weighted routing
DNS failover between resources
Integration with other AWS services

Good fit for

→Hosting DNS for AWS-based applications
→Failing over traffic between regions
→Routing users to the lowest-latency endpoint

Tags: dns; aws; domain-registration; traffic-routing; health-checks; cloud

Amazon Route 53: questions and answers

What is Amazon Route 53 used for?: Amazon Route 53 is AWS's scalable DNS service, also providing domain registration and health-check based traffic routing. It is a good fit for hosting DNS for AWS-based applications, failing over traffic between regions and routing users to the lowest-latency endpoint.
How much does Amazon Route 53 cost?: Amazon Route 53 is a paid product with no free plan. Pay as you go with no upfront fees: $0.50 per hosted zone per month for the first 25 zones and $0.40 per million standard DNS queries. Traffic Flow policy records cost $50 per month.
Is Amazon Route 53 open source?: No. Amazon Route 53 is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Route 53 include CoreDNS, Technitium DNS Server and PowerDNS.
What are some alternatives to Amazon Route 53?: Amazon Route 53 competes with Cloudflare, NS1 and DNSimple. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Route 53 alternatives.