AWS Route 53 Pricing

Question

I have set up a Tomcat Server on AWS Elastic Beanstalk Load Balancer. I also have a domain name registered with 1&1, e.g. www.example.com.

I would like to point the domain name at the Elastic Load Balancer.

I have read that the best option is to use AWS's Route 53 and that it is relatively affordable. However, when I look at it's pricing:

https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/

It says that there are various costs depending on usage, plus $50/month. This is opposed to 1&1 of about $10/year for a domain.

Question1

Am I reading the AWS Route 53's pricing correctly?

Question2

If I don't use Route 53, and rather 'use a CNAME record to route queries to your load balancer', does that just redirect the domain name (www.example.com) to the ELB (example.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/)? Ie, does it just change the url to example.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/? If this is the case, it's not suitable, because the domain name in the browser url needs to be www.example.com for SEO and the https certificate lets secure traffic on that name.

Thanks

Solution

All prices below are current as of 26th June 2017 and may change.

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Q1: Route53 is a DNS service, not a domain registration service. To host DNS with Amazon, there is a flat fee of $0.50 per month, or $6 per year, per domain for use of the Route53 DNS service.

Depending on the number of queries your domain receives, there are additional charges. $0.40 per million for the first billion queries in each month. Assuming around one million requests per month (averaged at 23 per minute), this brings the total cost of the Route53 service to $0.90 per month, or $10.80 per year.

The $50 per month cost that you mention is only applied if you use the Route53 Traffic Flow feature, documented in more detail here.

Note that all charges here are in addition to your domain registration cost. It should be noted that of course most registrars provide DNS services for free. However the level of service provided is most likely higher (the Route53 SLA is 100%), and the functionality (CLI tools, API) is much better.

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Q2: If you use a CNAME, the redirection will happen at the DNS level, and will not affect the URL being requested.

Comments

[Richard]

Hi Craig, thank you for your answer. Just a quick question please. If I am using my registered domain (www.example.com) for a simple website and for some RESTful webservices, is there any disadvantage with keeping my domain name with 1&1 and using a CNAME to direct it to the AWS ELB? (I already have my email, etc set up with 1&1, and it will be less work to do this)

[ObiwanKeTobi]

@Richard no functional difference whatsoever, DNS happens before the HTTP request is even initialised.

[Richard]

Thank you. I think a CNAME is my simplest solution then. Appreciate the help.

[Hashim Aziz]

If my domain is hosted at a registrar but I manage its DNS via Route 53, are there any domain renewal costs to pay with Route 53 or do I still only pay my registrar for those?

[ObiwanKeTobi]

@Hashim Route53 provides DNS only, so no.

[Hashim Aziz]

@CraigWatson It's actually also a registrar, which is what confused me, but doing some more research I think the answer is still no. Will find out for sure when I get my bill at the end of the month.