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AWS Solutions Architect · Lesson

Hosted Zones and DNS Record Types

Create public and private hosted zones, add A, CNAME, ALIAS, and MX records, and understand TTL implications.

Introduction to Amazon Route 53

Amazon Route 53 is AWS's highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) service. It translates human-readable domain names (like api.example.com) into IP addresses that computers use to connect. Route 53 also provides domain registration, health checks, and sophisticated traffic routing policies.

Route 53 is designed to be 100% available (backed by an SLA of 100% uptime) and is distributed across AWS edge locations worldwide, giving it sub-10ms query response times globally.

Public Hosted Zones

A public hosted zone is a container for DNS records that define how internet traffic is routed for a domain. When you register a domain or transfer one to Route 53, a public hosted zone is created automatically. You can also create a hosted zone for a domain registered elsewhere and point the domain's name servers to Route 53.

Each hosted zone costs a small monthly fee plus per-query charges. When you create a hosted zone, Route 53 assigns four name server (NS) records—you must configure these at your domain registrar to delegate DNS resolution to Route 53.

# Create a public hosted zone
aws route53 create-hosted-zone \
  --name example.com \
  --caller-reference 2026-06-20-unique-id \
  --hosted-zone-config Comment='Production hosted zone',PrivateZone=false

All lessons in this course

  1. Hosted Zones and DNS Record Types
  2. Routing Policies: Simple, Weighted, and Latency
  3. Failover and Geolocation Routing
  4. Health Checks and DNS Failover
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