Amazon Route 53Pricing

Amazon Route 53 Pricing

When business and website traffic is increasing so is the need for reliability. You need to guarantee your site is always available for sales. Shared hosting sites won’t give you that reliability. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Amazon Route 53 as a cost-effective and reliable DNS solution for small businesses. You will also have the added advantage of integrating it with Amazon’s other cloud computing services.

What does Amazon Route 53 do?

Amazon Route 53 is a domain name system (DNS) server. Name servers like Route 53 are a database of DNS records used to handle queries from clients to the server. The end goal is to turn the domain name into IP addresses so that end users can access the site from their browsers.

DNS servers are important for businesses to be able to initiate failover and ensure they remain up and running without issue. It’s especially important for businesses that have a high volume of visitors every month.

Blogs, new startups, or businesses will often use web hosting sites like GoDaddy or NameCheap to keep their site live. This is simpler and requires almost zero tech skills, but it does mean there’s room for error. You can’t control whether the site goes down and you have fewer recovery options. This is why enterprises with high volume traffic need more control over their hosting servers.

"Most of Route 53's services are centered around ensuring your static site is up and running, and their pricing reflects that. It’s also important to manage and route traffic, as well as have metrics of your web platform’s performance.

According to enlyft.com, most Route 53 customers are from tech, retail, or hospital and health care industries.

The general company sizes of Route 53 customers are considered small businesses with less than 50 employees. The costs of AWS Route 53 are generally small business-friendly because they are flexible and dependant on your usage. You can find reviews from small businesses that have used Route 53 on our site when you filter by company size or industry here.

If you are unfamiliar with DNS systems and what to learn more about what DNS and what they’re for AWS has a great introduction page here.

What is the cost of Amazon Route 53?

AWS Route 53 has extremely detailed usage rates available on its pricing page. We highly recommend visiting for yourself and trying out their pricing calculator so you can estimate your very specific needs. You can find their info page here.

The pricing for AWS Route 53 is so intricate it will absolutely drive you insane. Every possible factor has its own cost or conditions attached to it.

AWS Route 53 is a pay-per-use pricing model. They don’t have upfront fees or commitments. When they say pay for what you use, they mean every single service and task you use.

This includes hosted zones, DNS queries, managed domain names, and everything else in-between. The in-between costs you can expect are health checks, traffic flow, and the different types of queries.

Other in-between costs could be running into another AWS application you may need to use in combination, like Amazon S3 for storage.

It’s important you understand your estimate with the pricing calculator is just a baseline because of all the other contributing factors that can affect your overall cost.

The rates AWS Route gives you are in cents per amount of time or per usage. Zones are the rate per month and queries are the rate per million queries. Some costs are prorated and some are not prorated. This all means that you can expect plenty of fun DIY math on your part.

We do have a section at the end of pricing where we go into the pricing calculator with very basic settings. This way you can have a pre-estimate before you input your costs. You can also speak with a representative and have them help you understand more of your overall costs. You can contact an expert here.

AWS will send you a monthly bill for Route 53 that lists usage and their full dollar amounts. The bill will not include any other AWS services you used, those would be billed separately. Below the next few sections are some of the main factors you are billed for with Route 53.

Zones

The hosted zone is for your domains and subdomains to your web platform. You use it to store the records. The records have the information or instructions for routing your internet traffic to the right domains. Your hosted zones can be public for regular traffic or private for a virtual private cloud. For more information see amazon’s definition page for hosted zones here.

Each hosted zones allows up to 10k records, if you use more than that it will be an extra $0.0015 cents per month. The hosted zone costs are not prorated if you use less than one full month.

You can delete a hosted zone within 12 hours and not be charged, but queries from the hosted zone will still incur charges at the rates in the table. Queries are essentially a visitors request to see your site, so you do need to pay for those visits in your hosted zone before it was completely deleted.

This means that even though you only pay for what you use there will still be costs you can’t control. This is because other factors can drive your usage, like visitors to your public zone. For most established companies, you should know your general stats and needs for your hosted zones.

Some startups may find they could have more usage than expected. It’s best to plan your needs for the future and do some research on similar companies' monthly usage. If you’re running any brand campaigns for awareness or frequently have sales and promotions, you should expect to pay for increased usage.

You can contact sales if your team needs over 500 hosted zones or much more than 10k records for each zone. You can fill out a form to talk to their experts here.

Queries

DNS queries are requests to your DNS Server. Most requests also ask for the IP address, which you do register with Route 52. You’ll see in the pricing calculator section below where that is priced. You set it up with the resolver endpoints.

The pricing section for queries alone is saturated with minute details and changing costs. This is definitely one of the big parts of AWS Route 52 pricing that you need to pay close attention.

The query costs are per million per month and they are prorated. If you had 100,00 standard queries a month your cost would be $0.04. If instead, you had 100,000 latency-based routing queries it would be 0.06 a month.

The table of costs Amazon provides is very simple. The conditions that can apply aren’t so simple. The special conditions that can affect your monthly bill include:

• A query not matching the record type for your domain

• Queries for non-existent records

• Alias queries

Sometimes the queries sent to the server won't fully match the record type for you domain record name. Browsers can send simultaneous queries that match and do not match the record type. AWS Route charges you the standard rate for both the mismatching query and the matching query.

You need to plan for this by expanding the types of records you offer. Standard rates also apply for queries to a record that does not exist for your domain, like misspelled domain names.

Alias queries are actually good news. An alias query is a query designated for an alias record connecting to AWS resources. It’s like sharing files within the same network, and as a benefit, AWS charges no additional costs. Alias queries are free.

There are specific qualifications for your alias queries to be free. The alias record needs to be the same name and type for the alias query. Your alias target must be an approved AWS resource, and another Route 53 record does not count.

If you want to see which AWS resources can allow you to make an alias record go here. Some applications on the list include Amazon S3 buckets, Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), and Amazon CloudFront distributions.

Traffic Flow

Traffic flow is pretty simple and only has one rate. You are paying for one policy record for the domain you want to manage traffic flow. This service is prorated. You are not charged for traffic policies that arent connects to your DNS name’s policy record.

In comparison to other rates this one doesn’t require a ton of math as others. If you have quite a few domain names then you will pay more, but this rate is affordable for managing traffic flow.

Health Checks

Health checks are tricky. You should do them frequently but it comes down to your preference and needs. The costs for health checks with Route 53 have multiple contributing factors that don’t make pricing too easy to understand.

Costs are based on health checks performed each month. The rates are prorated. They allow up to 200 health checks a month. You can contact an expert if you need more here.

Health checks with Route 53 also come with the added benefit of their initial 50 Health Checks being free! The catch is they need to be for AWS endpoints. AWS endpoints are defined as resources within AWS. They have to be connected to the same AWS account your health check is run. Health checks for Amazon S3 buckets and Elastic load Balancing endpoints are already free.

They also do not roll over so it’s best to use them quickly. For more information see their pricing page here.

In the rates listed, AWS mentions optional features for health checks. These features refer to HTTPS, string matching, fast interval, and latency measurement. If you want to learn more about what Route 53 AWS health checks offer you can go here. For those of you that may want to know how to configure it for DNS failover, you can go to the instruction page here.

Resolver Endpoints

Route 53 Resolver endpoints need to connect to at least 2 IP addresses for your web platform. Each address is associated with an elastic network interface (ENI).

The cost is per ENI, per hour running. The inbound and outbound queries running through the resolver endpoint are charged per million and billed monthly. If you are resolving locally through the endpoint queries won’t be charged.

Route 53 also won’t charge you for your resolver query logs, but you could be charged because of interaction with other AWS cloud applications like CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. For more insight see CloudWatch’s pricing for logs here. We also have a pricing page on TrustRadius for AWS CloudWatch costs that you can find here.

DNS Firewall

The Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall has pricing based on domain names and queries it interacts with. All domains within a domain list, inside a rule group, are each charged a fee. The fee is per month and it is prorated.

The queries are per million processed each month.. Queries Route 53 charges for queries that come from VPCs associated with firewall rule groups. Queries from resolver endpoints on-premises networks to VPCs associated with firewall rule groups are also charged as well as queries from CNAMES.

If your domains are in managed lists inside your firewall they are not charged, but queries are charged.

Recovery Controller

The AWS’ Route 53 Application Recovery Controller ensures the stability of your DNS for recovery. It does with readiness checks and configured clusters.

The readiness check performs an audit of resources in availability zones/regions. The audit makes sure that those resources are all set for future recovery. You are charged for each readiness check you configure in your application and connected AWS applications.

The cluster is made up of redundant regional endpoints. They are able to host multiple routing controls so you can trigger failovers when needed. You pay for each configured cluster but they are capped at 2.

As a heads up, options to estimate the cost with the recovery controller do not appear in the pricing calculator. We are aware that’s super annoying.

Domain Names, DNSSEC

You can buy your domain from AWS if you don’t already have one. When you buy domain names the top-level domain (TLD) decides just how expensive example.com is versus example.org, etc. Purchasing and registering domains with AWS is billed by years, upfront. You can see their TLD pricing PDF here.

You are capped at 20 domain registrations per AWS account but you can contact an expert if you do need more.

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is for added security. When it comes to DNSSEC you are not charged for using it for signing on public hosted zones or for validating your Route 53 Resolver.

You can be charged for interaction with another AWS service. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) will charge you if you store a private key and use its instance to sign zones. If you want to learn more about KMS, you can visit their pricing page here.

Inbetween Costs and Additional Charges

The best part of AWS is all of the added costs because of interactions with other applications or because of multiple tiny stipulations on each individual task. It’s the most fun you will ever have, reading their fine print.

For public DNS query logs, Route 53 does not charge, but if you use AWS CloudWatch there is the possibility of charges for things like data ingestion, archival storage, and analysis of metrics. We again recommend looking at the AWS CloudWatch pricing page here and our CloudWatch pricing page here. The rate of charges will vary so see the DNS query logs info page here.

There are also taxes. Please know that taxes are not included in the pricing calculator estimate nor do they appear on the Route 53 pricing page. If you have promotional credits, you cannot use them to pay down your bills. If you interact with other AWS resources you may find the charge, not in your Route 53 bill, but actually in the bill for the other service.

AWS Route 53 in The AWS Pricing Calculator

The first thing you should know is the pricing calculator helps you reach an estimate, not the exact cost. We talk about the contributing factors that can affect what you pay for with AWS Route 53 in the sections above.

You should also keep in mind interaction with other AWS applications will increase your costs. Sometimes the interaction may not be obvious so it’s good to stay vigilant. We mentioned quite a few examples in the sections above.

There is also a little note you should see when looking up Route 53 in the calculator, that states the calculator is only an estimate and does not include taxes. You can see in it in the image under “Acknowledgment.”

When you go to input your DNS server information for your web platform, you should know the average number of queries or requests you get. You should also have the information about your hosted zones, domains, and network interfaces.

If for some reason you are unsure about some of the numbers for your network you can check out some forums on ServerFault.com or other forums sites like Reddit or Quora.

For our estimate in the pricing calculator, we low-balled all of the estimates to keep it as simple as possible. This is not the estimate of an average site but is just meant to achieve a number. This is because some initial costs with AWS Route 53 are free, so to see an estimate you need to input higher numbers.

It’s important to know which AWS region corresponds to yours. The costs will 100% change for each reason so accuracy is key. Since Route 53 resources are global you just need to choose one region to estimate your costs.

The hosted cones come with special discounted costs. Your first 10,000 records are free so you need to enter more than that to actually see it in the price breakdown at the bottom. When you are inputting amounts, the AWS Cloud’s calculator has notes like the one in the image above to help you be more accurate.

In this part, we imputed 2 for zones, and 10k for all queries including standard, latency based, and GEO DNS.

For health checks, we went with 100 a month, still under the cap of 200 checks per month. When it comes to checks it really depends on what you think works for your web application’s needs.

There are quite a few different options for health checks. The choices in the picture are the special features of the optional health check.

The elastic network interfaces are the ENI for each IP address you connect. The lowest amount you can connect is two.

We entered one domain to store, for a small company with one site. We also imputed 10k queries again.

You will not get the full estimate until you click on the orange button labeled “Add to my estimate.” You can share this estimate and keep working on it if you generate a public URL. Once you have played with the estimate enough then it would be a good time to contact them and learn more about the service.

The end result is an estimate of $281.51 per month, and 3,378,12 for the whole year. Your cost will most likely be much larger than our small estimate but now you know what information you need to have ready to input.

As one last reminder, other outside factors can affect your real-life cost. The estimate you get from the calculator is just to help you consider them against other services. It’s probably best if you round your estimate up heavily so you can budget for more, just in case.

What is The Difference Between Amazon Route 53 and Google Cloud?

DNS service providers have a lot in common with each other and the Google Cloud DNS server isn’t an exception. They price by zones and queries, billed monthly just like Amazon Route 53.

The main difference for GCP DNS doesn’t charge for as many small details like in Route 53. This does make them cheaper than Amazon Route 53. Below is an example of their pricing calculator. You can also go here to view their pricing calculator (you have to manually select Cloud DNS).

There are only two input fields to even create an estimate with GCP DNS, zones, and queries. The cost for say 2 zones and 10k queries a month is only $0.40 per month.

GCP also provides different pricing examples for each company’s use cases. One is a standard static website, another for enterprises, and the last for web virtual hosting providers. In their version of a standard site, they put 5 zones, and 10 million queries per month, which is $5.00 billed monthly.

You should still understand that your usage like with AWS Route 53, could run into other GCP web applications. This means that estimates can easily be more expensive than you expected. In Amazon Route 53, they do their best to inform you of areas where you can incur unexpected charges, and they have much more detailed pricing options.

If you’re looking for the simplest service for your website then GCP would be a better choice for you. If you want more control over intricate options then AWS would suit you better.

You can find more pricing examples on their pricing page here. For more alternatives, you can see the comparison page for AWS Route 53 here. There you can consider other DNS providers like Cloudflare with access to end-user reviews.

More Resources

If you are interested in seeing other DNS management options then you should see our list here. You will find ratings and reviews to give you valuable insight into satisfaction with services.

For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.