Should I transfer my domain to AWS? AWS Route53 price vs GoDaddy

Question

I'm thinking about transferring my domains from GoDaddy to AWS Route53. But I'm a little confused about the pricing format of AWS.

In GoDaddy you just pay to register the domain name each year and then you don't have to pay anything else.

But in AWS after you pay for the domain each year (I think is like $12 for a .com) and it seems do you have to pay each time someone visits your website or tries to resolve the DNS to an IP?

If yes, is the cost the same in these 3 cases? 1) If the DNS is pointing to an EC2 instance 2) If its pointing to a static S3 hosted website 3) If its pointing to an IP address that is not in the AWS network.

I'm worried that after transferring my domain to AWS I will end up paying more depending on how many people visit my website.

Many thanks in advance!

Solution

AWS Route53 pricing is public, but AWS pricing can be confusing.

There are two separate DNS functions, which can be separated:

• Domain registration
• DNS service

Domain registration

AWS charges $12 per year for a .com registration (link may change - use the link above in the "domain names" section). That's just for having the domain name.

DNS Service

This runs a server that lets people find your server / load balancer / etc. AWS currently charges $0.50 per month to provision the service, then $0.40 per million queries. Latency or geo based routing queries cost a little more. Unless you have a very popular website this tends to cost very little.

CloudFlare

You can alternately use the CloudFlare free service to provide DNS service, which is what I do. If you're using AWS load balancers or auto scaling then you're much better off with Route53, but for simple cases where there are fixed servers with a number of IPs it works great.

The other advantages of CloudFlare is they can also act as a free CDN, reducing traffic, if you configure your caching headers appropriately (link). They also block DDOS and other bad actors. To make this really effective you should configure your AWS security group to only accept traffic from CloudFlare and your own IP addresses. I have a tutorial that covers some of that here.

CloudFlare also has a domain registration service, which is $8 for a .com as they sell at cost with no markup.

Comments

[Raphaël Ponthieu]

I suggest you also look at cloudflare.com which is better value and has solid api for any programmatic changes

[Tim]

Yeah, probably about the same. GoDaddy's user interface is horrible and there are constant upsells.

[Bluetoba]

Hi @Tim, your answer about cloudflare attracts me. At the moment, I am positioning AWS WAF in front of CloudFront, it then accesses both API Gateway and S3 buckets for images and static websites. I am looking to save money for my DDOS protection, SQL injection, and others. Can I use you CloudFlare to provide me those types of protection (the ones typically taken care of by AWS WAF) before hitting my AWS CloudFront? In fact, can we use both CloudFlare and AWS WAF both at the same time? I am happy to open up a new thread if you are willing to answer this question separately.

[Tim]

Yes you can use CloudFlare with AWS CloudFront, but CloudFlare is basically a replacement for AWS WAF + AWS CloudFront. There's not much point having two CDNs. I believe WAF features require a paid CloudFlare plan. You might find there's an advantage to CloudFront over CloudFlare depending on what you're doing.

[Bluetoba]

You are right, I was blindsided on the DDoS capabilities for CloudFlare. It makes no sense to send one CDN to another. Thanks, Tim

[Tim]

I use CloudFlare as my CDN / WAF. I allow only my private home IP and CloudFlare IPs into my EC2 server using security groups, it caches and acts as a CDN, works very well and the pricing can be a LOT lower than AWS. With some providers like Azure and Digital Ocean I think bandwidth from the cloud to CloudFlare is free, but not with AWS cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance