Working with public hosted zones

A public hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic on the internet for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains (acme.example.com, zenith.example.com). You get a public hosted zone in one of two ways:

• When you register a domain with Route 53, we create a hosted zone for you automatically.

• When you transfer DNS service for an existing domain to Route 53, you start by creating a hosted zone for the domain. For more information, see Making Amazon Route 53 the DNS service for an existing domain.

In both cases, you then create records in the hosted zone to specify how you want to route traffic for the domain and subdomains. For example, you might create a record to route traffic for www.example.com to a CloudFront distribution or to a web server in your data center. For more information about records, see Working with records.

This topic explains how to use the Amazon Route 53 console to create, list, and delete public hosted zones.

Note

You can also use a Route 53 private hosted zone to route traffic within one or more VPCs that you create with the Amazon VPC service. For more information, see Working with private hosted zones.

Topics

• Considerations when working with public hosted zones
• Creating a public hosted zone
• Getting the name servers for a public hosted zone
• Listing public hosted zones
• Viewing DNS query metrics for a public hosted zone
• Deleting a public hosted zone
• Checking DNS responses from Route 53
• Configuring white-label name servers
• NS and SOA records that Amazon Route 53 creates for a public hosted zone