{"slug": "amazon-route-53", "name": "Amazon Route 53", "category": "networking", "category_name": "Networking and VPN", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 13, "warners": 3, "score": 3.086, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2025-11-17", "latest": "2026-10-10", "why": "We moved to Route 53; our expected bill is around $5K/year.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 5, "compare": 0, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "We moved to Route 53; our expected bill is around $5K/year.", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://aws.amazon.com/route53/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Amazon Route 53", "Route 53", "AWS Route 53"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 800482801, "item_id": 50030175, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030175", "by": "PaywallBuster", "date": "2026-10-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We moved to Route 53; our expected bill is around $5K/year.", "excerpt": "Show HN: SV Premium \u2013 Compare infrastructure prices at your actual usage Hi HN, I built https://svpremium.dev after two migrations cut our infrastructure bills far more than I expected. DNS: ~$150K \u2192 ~$5K/year. We\u2019d used NS1 for years, initially for advanced features like filter chains. As we moved our infrastructure to anycast, we ended up mostly using basic DNS and geo routing. But we were still on an annual, prepa", "context": "infra owner who cut bills", "use_case": "DNS", "switched_from": "NS1", "story": "Show HN: The safe-choice tax \u2013 what the vendor nobody gets fired for costs"}, {"id": 791485584, "item_id": 49467849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467849", "by": "dougcalobrisi", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Route53 makes a great, simple, HA key-value store for some use cases.", "excerpt": "Route53 makes a great, simple, HA key-value store for some use cases. I've used it in GitHub Actions when nothing else was easily available to store values and put a little post together explaining how a while back. For many things, there isn't a reason for more complexity. https://doug.sh/posts/route53-as-a-key-value-store-2026-edition/", "context": "", "use_case": "Key-value store", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launching Route 53 Files"}, {"id": 769216336, "item_id": 48076021, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076021", "by": "easton", "date": "2026-05-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s worth enabling if you\u2019re changing dns all the time", "excerpt": "They actually kind of fixed this recently, you can ask them to move your route53 control plane to another region in the event of us-east-1 breaking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/accelerated-recovery.html There\u2019s a bunch of caveats but it\u2019s worth enabling if you\u2019re changing dns all the time (as most AWS networking doodads like to do).", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS data center outage hits trading on Fanduel, Coinbase"}, {"id": 753097456, "item_id": 47068591, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068591", "by": "UltraSane", "date": "2026-02-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use AWS Route53 and you can get incredibly granular with API permissions", "excerpt": "I use AWS Route53 and you can get incredibly granular with API permissions Key condition keys for this purpose include: route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsActions: Limits actions to CREATE, UPDATE, or DELETE. route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsRecordTypes: Limits actions to specific DNS record types (e.g., A, CNAME, TXT). route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsRecordValues: Limits actions based on the specific value of the DNS re", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS hosting with granular IAM", "switched_from": "", "story": "DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation"}, {"id": 738676705, "item_id": 46167294, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167294", "by": "yearolinuxdsktp", "date": "2025-12-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections", "excerpt": "AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections, plus AWS WAF (can be expensive depending on your budget).", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS with DDoS protection", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 778629712, "item_id": 48664357, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664357", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-06-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "AWS charges for every single thing", "excerpt": "A lot of providers have basic DNS for free but charge for more sophisticated uses like geo routing. AWS charges for every single thing: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/ I refuse to use Cloudflare for two reasons: 1) It\u2019s free until it\u2019s not and they don\u2019t tell you where that limit is. 2) If something goes wrong you cannot contact anyone unless you have an enterprise agreement. Just paying them money is not eno", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 778541952, "item_id": 48658872, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658872", "by": "matja", "date": "2026-06-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "which would terrify me if I used it", "excerpt": "Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 745964880, "item_id": 46622805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622805", "by": "russellbeattie", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "tl;dr: Don't use AWS as your registrar.", "excerpt": "Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you. I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36. In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is \"closed\", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately. Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it ", "context": "", "use_case": "domain registrar and DNS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?"}]}], "who": [{"by": "PaywallBuster", "context": "infra owner who cut bills", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030175", "date": "2026-10-10"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["dns", "dns hosting", "key-value store", "dns hosting with granular iam", "dns records", "domain registrar and dns"], "compared": [{"slug": "cloudflare", "name": "Cloudflare", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 746987089, "item_id": 46686693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686693", "by": "colmmacc", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "At EC2 and Route 53 we weren't supporting this", "excerpt": "I am very petty about this one bug and have a very old axe to grind that this reminded me of! Way back in 2011 CloudFlare launched an incredibly poorly researched feature to just return CNAME records at a domain apex ... RFCs be damned. https://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp/ , and I quote directly ... \"Never one to let a RFC stand in the way of a solution to a real problem, we're h", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48657030", "title": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030174", "title": "Show HN: The safe-choice tax \u2013 what the vendor nobody gets fired for costs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49465732", "title": "Launching Route 53 Files", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48069088", "title": "AWS data center outage hits trading on Fanduel, Coinbase", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542644", "title": "Installing a Let's Encrypt TLS Certificate on a Brother Printer with Certbot", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47453738", "title": "You Can Run a DNS Server", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {"warn": 2}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 800482801, "item_id": 50030175, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030175", "by": "PaywallBuster", "date": "2026-10-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We moved to Route 53; our expected bill is around $5K/year.", "excerpt": "Show HN: SV Premium \u2013 Compare infrastructure prices at your actual usage Hi HN, I built https://svpremium.dev after two migrations cut our infrastructure bills far more than I expected. DNS: ~$150K \u2192 ~$5K/year. We\u2019d used NS1 for years, initially for advanced features like filter chains. As we moved our infrastructure to anycast, we ended up mostly using basic DNS and geo routing. But we were still on an annual, prepa", "context": "infra owner who cut bills", "use_case": "DNS", "switched_from": "NS1", "story": "Show HN: The safe-choice tax \u2013 what the vendor nobody gets fired for costs"}, {"id": 791485584, "item_id": 49467849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467849", "by": "dougcalobrisi", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Route53 makes a great, simple, HA key-value store for some use cases.", "excerpt": "Route53 makes a great, simple, HA key-value store for some use cases. I've used it in GitHub Actions when nothing else was easily available to store values and put a little post together explaining how a while back. For many things, there isn't a reason for more complexity. https://doug.sh/posts/route53-as-a-key-value-store-2026-edition/", "context": "", "use_case": "Key-value store", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launching Route 53 Files"}, {"id": 778629712, "item_id": 48664357, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664357", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-06-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "AWS charges for every single thing", "excerpt": "A lot of providers have basic DNS for free but charge for more sophisticated uses like geo routing. AWS charges for every single thing: https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/ I refuse to use Cloudflare for two reasons: 1) It\u2019s free until it\u2019s not and they don\u2019t tell you where that limit is. 2) If something goes wrong you cannot contact anyone unless you have an enterprise agreement. Just paying them money is not eno", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 778541952, "item_id": 48658872, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658872", "by": "matja", "date": "2026-06-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "which would terrify me if I used it", "excerpt": "Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're making Bunny DNS free: because a faster internet won't build itself"}, {"id": 769216336, "item_id": 48076021, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076021", "by": "easton", "date": "2026-05-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s worth enabling if you\u2019re changing dns all the time", "excerpt": "They actually kind of fixed this recently, you can ask them to move your route53 control plane to another region in the event of us-east-1 breaking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/accelerated-recovery.html There\u2019s a bunch of caveats but it\u2019s worth enabling if you\u2019re changing dns all the time (as most AWS networking doodads like to do).", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AWS data center outage hits trading on Fanduel, Coinbase"}, {"id": 760715072, "item_id": 47544692, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544692", "by": "throw0101a", "date": "2026-03-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Route53 as an example", "excerpt": "> I've been hesitant to set that up because I'm concerned about the potential compromise of a token that has permissions to edit my DNS zone. Depending on your DNS provider, it may be possible to narrow the permissions to allow only updates of a particular record. Route53 as an example: { \"Effect\": \"Allow\", \"Action\": \"route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets\", \"Resource\": \"arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/<ZONE-ID>\", \"Condition\"", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Installing a Let's Encrypt TLS Certificate on a Brother Printer with Certbot"}, {"id": 760263201, "item_id": 47516450, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516450", "by": "catlifeonmars", "date": "2026-03-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use it with Route53 to do automatic renewal", "excerpt": "Lego is solid. I use it with Route53 to do automatic renewal of LE certs for various endpoints before the certs expire.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Can Run a DNS Server"}, {"id": 753097456, "item_id": 47068591, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068591", "by": "UltraSane", "date": "2026-02-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use AWS Route53 and you can get incredibly granular with API permissions", "excerpt": "I use AWS Route53 and you can get incredibly granular with API permissions Key condition keys for this purpose include: route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsActions: Limits actions to CREATE, UPDATE, or DELETE. route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsRecordTypes: Limits actions to specific DNS record types (e.g., A, CNAME, TXT). route53:ChangeResourceRecordSetsRecordValues: Limits actions based on the specific value of the DNS re", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS hosting with granular IAM", "switched_from": "", "story": "DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation"}, {"id": 747961281, "item_id": 46747580, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747580", "by": "knowhy", "date": "2026-01-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "At work we use Ansible to setup Route53 records for infrastructure hosted elsewhere.", "excerpt": "I think there are active maintained modules https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/aws/index.html#plugins-in-amazon-aws At work we use Ansible to setup Route53 records for infrastructure hosted elsewhere. Not sure if that counts as infrastructure.", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS records", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why Does Destroying Resources via TF Suck?"}, {"id": 745964880, "item_id": 46622805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622805", "by": "russellbeattie", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "tl;dr: Don't use AWS as your registrar.", "excerpt": "Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you. I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36. In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is \"closed\", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately. Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it ", "context": "", "use_case": "domain registrar and DNS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?"}, {"id": 738676705, "item_id": 46167294, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167294", "by": "yearolinuxdsktp", "date": "2025-12-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections", "excerpt": "AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections, plus AWS WAF (can be expensive depending on your budget).", "context": "", "use_case": "DNS with DDoS protection", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?"}, {"id": 737694896, "item_id": 46105931, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46105931", "by": "splintersio", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Uses AWS Route53 to check if trusted domains are available for registration", "excerpt": "CSP Header Analysis: Scans websites for Content Security Policy headers Domain Extraction: Identifies all external domains trusted by CSP policies Availability Checking: Uses AWS Route53 to check if trusted domains are available for registration PublicWWW Research: Discovers how available domains are used across the web (optional) Bug Bounty Reports: Auto-generates professional security reports High-Performance Scann", "context": "", "use_case": "Domain availability checks", "switched_from": "", "story": "Content-Security-Policy Trust Erosion Scanner"}, {"id": 735362432, "item_id": 45960152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960152", "by": "kondro", "date": "2025-11-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "While there appears to be some us-east-1 SPoF for Route 53 updates (as shown recently), the actual health checks themselves occur in up to 8 different regions [1] with an 18%[2] agreement of failure required to initiate a failover. AWS has very good isolation between regions and, while it relies on us-east-1 for control plane updates to Route 53, health checks and failovers are data plane operations[3] and aren't aff", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "How when AWS was down, we were not"}]}