How to Utilize a GoDaddy Domain Through AWS Route53 ☁

Introduction 🌟

When you use Route53 to host your website, you might notice that not all Top-level domains are supported. For example, try registering for the domain test.app or test.blog, you will receive the below error messages :

This is what happened to me when I tried to register my blog's domain name (mumen.blog).

So, how can we fix this? ⚙

The first thing to do is find a domain registrar that supports your desired TLD; I registered mine through GoDaddy. However, I still want to use AWS CloudFront to get the best performance for my blog (you can read here blog to learn more about AWS CloudFront), and to do so, I had to find a way to connect that GoDaddy domain with AWS Route53.

How can we connect AWS Route53 with GoDaddy (or any other domain registrar)? 🔗

It's simple: all we have to do is create a new hosted zone in AWS Route53 with the exact domain name. After creation, that hosted zone will have its own name servers in an NS record. We then change the name servers that GoDaddy uses to match the ones in our AWS Route53 Hosted Zone, and that's it!

Let's now dive into more detailed steps! 🏊

1. Register your desired domain through any domain registrar (I'm using GoDaddy).
2. Sign in to your AWS Console using your AWS account.
3. Navigate to AWS Route53.
4. Create a Hosted Zone using the exact domain you registered in step#1.
5. Click on the Hosted Zone name in the Hosted Zones list.
6. Copy the name servers found as a value in the NS record in the hosted zone records.
7. Navigate to your domain registrar management page.
8. Change the name servers for your domain to those you copied in step#6.

That's it; you're now ready to utilize your domain through AWS Route53!

Summary 📓

As you might have noticed, the trick in this topic is just to make your domain registrar use the name servers that AWS assigned to your hosted zone.