Route 53

Static IP

You need a static IP before you create a PTR or A record. If you have not done that, assign a static IP now. Some cloud providers reset your IP when your machine boots. If this happens, your DNS will not function, so you need to have a static IP, or in AWS you can use an elastic IP and point the elastic IP to the current server.

A records will still point to the elastic IP, which is reserved, and considered static.

Route 53

Route 53 is the service we will use to purchase our domain and control the DNS records. Though it can be complex, we will setup only a few records. For completeness, here are best practices, even though will will not focus on them:

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Here are some best practices for managing domains with Route 53:

Use Route 53 health checks to monitor the health of your resources. You can set up health checks to monitor the availability of your web servers, databases, and other resources, and Route 53 can automatically route traffic away from unhealthy resources.

Use Route 53 policies to control access to your domains. You can use policies to specify which users or groups are allowed to create, delete, or update records for your domains.

Use Route 53 alias records to map domain names to AWS resources. Alias records are a type of Route 53 record that can be used to map a domain name to an AWS resource, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or an Elastic Load Balancer. Alias records offer the advantage of being automatically updated if the IP address of the resource changes.

Use Route 53 geolocation routing to route traffic to the closest available resource. Geolocation routing allows you to specify different resources for different locations, so that users are routed to the closest available resource. This can improve the performance and speed of your website or application.

Use Route 53 latency-based routing to route traffic to the lowest-latency resource. Latency-based routing allows you to specify multiple resources for the same domain, and Route 53 will automatically route traffic to the resource with the lowest latency (i.e., the shortest network connection time). This can improve the performance and speed of your website or application.

Use Route 53 failover routing to create a disaster recovery plan. Failover routing allows you to specify a primary resource for a domain and a secondary failover resource. If the primary resource becomes unavailable, Route 53 will automatically route traffic to the secondary resource.

Use Route 53 weighted routing to split traffic between multiple resources. Weighted routing allows you to specify the percentage of traffic that should be routed to each resource. This can be useful for testing or rolling out new features.

Hosted Zone

Route 53 creates a group to contain all DNS records for a particular domain. They call these containers “hosted zones”. It’s basically a fancy term for “click here to edit this record”. If you want the actual, technical description, keep reading.

In Amazon Route 53, a hosted zone is a container for resource record sets that you create to route traffic to your resources. When you create a hosted zone, you specify the domain name that you want to associate with the hosted zone, and Route 53 creates a set of name servers for the hosted zone.

Each hosted zone corresponds to a domain name and its associated DNS records. For example, if you create a hosted zone for the domain example.com, the hosted zone will contain the DNS records for example.com and all of its subdomains.

When you create a hosted zone, Route 53 automatically creates a set of name servers for the hosted zone. These name servers are used to delegate control of the domain to Route 53. You can then create resource record sets for the hosted zone to route traffic to your resources.

Hosted zones are used to manage DNS records for your domains

A Record

A records map a domain name to an IP. Someone types in “domain.com” and the internet knows that is 1.2.3.4.

If you do not have an A record, you cannot get to your site by name.

Create an A Record and a CNAME record very much the same way.

Create a hosted zone
Create A record inside the hosted zone (blank is record, value is IP address)
Create CNAME record inside the hostned zone (www is record, value is domain.com)

CNAME Record

CNAME records are not required, but they are best practice. You should set it up.

Note the “www” is in the record name, and the value is the domain. That will force everyone who visits www.domain.com to instead go to domain.com

PTR Record

As you use Elastic IP (3.17.9.246 IP), you don’t need to configure both hosted zone. You created A record (hollowedstone.com. / type A / Value = 3.17.49.246) in hosted zone (ID = Z047555328WNPDP373MRN) You updated the reverse DNS record via EC2 Console (https://us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-east-2#Addresses). These are enough for reverse DNS of the EIP address.

In my experience, I still created a PTR record but maybe I should wait longer?

PTR (Pointer) records, also known as Reverse DNS records, are used to map an IP address to a hostname. PTR records are used for the reverse DNS lookup process, which maps an IP address to a hostname. Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a PTR record in Amazon Route 53:

In the navigation pane, choose Hosted Zones.

Choose the hosted zone that you want to create a PTR record in.

In the Record Sets section, choose Create Record Set.

For Type, choose PTR.

For Name, enter the IP address that you want to map to a hostname, in reverse notation (e.g., for the IP address 192.0.2.1, the name would be 1.2.0.192.in-addr.arpa).

For Value, enter the hostname that you want to map to the IP address.

Choose Create.

Your PTR record will now be created and will be used to map the specified IP address to the specified hostname during the reverse DNS lookup process. It may take some time for the record to propagate and become fully functional.