This is a pretty interesting move. Google has started offering domain names [1] in beta, but with my experience with their support I don't plan on using it.
Pricing is a big part of domains for me and AWS pricing seems a bit high to me. I'm also not sure on if whois privacy is offered or included? If it was then the domain price would be fine. I noticed a Route53 zone is included, but is it included in the price or costs additional? I had a domain with low traffic and it was $6/year just for DNS hosted zone so if it was included in the domain price I would probably move all of my domains, though whois privacy is still a big concern.
For the past few years I've been moving to Hover ($15) and then lately Badger ($10) as it is cheaper, but they both have whois privacy bundled in with the domain price as I think it is an important service. I previously worked on and maintained a domain registrar so these hit pretty close to home, but I'm still not really happy with any solution. It seems Amazon's model of getting pricing lower didn't really come through with this new offering just comparing to the current market.
Could hosted email be the next big thing AWS introduces? With as many people who are frustrated by lack of good options (Google Apps) it could be an interesting next stage for AWS (App Hosting, Domain Registrations, and Email Hosting), then I don't know what will happen to traditional hosting providers, but I think they will be trying to figure out how to stay relevant.
> Pricing is a big part of domains for me and AWS pricing seems a bit high to me
I suspect this is because of their partnership with Gandi to make this happen.
But really, we're only talking a few bucks either way. If you are using AWS, is it likely to matter whether you could find a domain name $2 cheaper somewhere else? You are paying more because not only can you register domains, you can manage them with a slick HTTP API that knows about a bunch of other AWS services.
That, and you're typically also paying for a more expensive SSL certificate, much more expensive wildcard SSL cert, or much much more expensive EV or signing certificates.
> I had a domain with low traffic and it was $6/year just for DNS hosted zone
Amazon should give away free hosted DNS zones for Amazon-registered domains. The $0.50 per hosted zone per month doesn't scale down very well. I have a dozen domains I've accumulated for various projects I'll probably never finish. Their traffic is almost zero. I would much rather use Route 53 DNS for these domains, but at $6/month it's not worth it. I would seriously consider transferring domain registration from Gandi to AWS if it included free hosted zones.
EDIT: I didn't realize initially that Amazon is in fact partnering with Gandi, which doesn't change anything, but it's interesting.
"When you purchase new domains via Route 53, the service will automatically configure a Hosted Zone for each domain and ensure the privacy of your WHOIS record at no additional charge".
configuring the hosted zone... but do you get charged for it as well? i can't tell by that language.
EDIT: just tried to set one up - it looks like it's still an extra charge, so.. $12 for a .com plus minimum $6/year $18/year - kinda high if you don't need all the flexibility of the amazon platform. I don't see a lot of domain parkers taking them up on this.
"If you don't want to use your domain right now, you can delete the hosted zone; if you delete it within 48 hours of registering the domain, there won't be any charge for the hosted zone on your AWS bill"
Good catch, thanks. I didn't see that when I was reading on my phone.
In that case I'm actually really excited about this then as the pricing seems pretty good with the registry price and ICANN domain fee plus the cost of maintaining a registrar and the WHOIS privacy I think I will be moving my domains.
It looks like prices are around the bulk D or E rates from Gandi (their upstream registrar). One notable exception is .io, which is currently $78 on AWS, but only $39 from Gandi (A rate).
Perhaps business-hostile isn't the best phrase, but their terms let Gandi stick their nose in areas which normally would be civil matters between a domain holder and a third party. For example, Gandi reserves the right to terminate your domain without notice if a third party notifies Gandi that you are involved in:
"any infringement of applicable law in any way (for example
using an automated script)" [section 12.2.1]
How familiar are you with the laws of France, under which this agreement has jurisdiction? Is your business a search engine and you have automated scripts which crawl websites, collecting information? What if collecting, storing, or displaying that information violates a law in France? Are you running some kind of bitcoin-related service and is it compliant with money laws in France? What if you have a ride-sharing service? Are you sure you're not running afoul of taxi regulations? In any case, I hope you have a lawyer who speaks French:
"Only the text of the French version of this Contract
shall govern in the event of a dispute of interpretation
of the present Contract."
Did someone file a copyright claim against content your users posted? Are you doing anything Gandi deems morally objectionable? Gandi could shut down your domain. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3405177
Our legal team says:
"You have obviously cut a big part of the article of Gandi's contract. Many registries which operate new gTLD's are entitled to cancel domain names at their own discretion in the light of their national laws (many German registries retain the right to suspend domain names if they do not comply with the laws of the Republic)."
Anyone can write to our legal department directly at legal [at] gandi [dot] net; we're happy to answer any questions.
You may also want to check out nsone.net and rage4 if you're looking for a decent GeoDNS service. I've been using nsone.net for a couple of months now and apart from them suffering a couple of DDoS attacks, I cannot fault them.
I'm uncertain why you feel they are competitive given Route 53's level of stability and the fact both of these services cost more [one considerably more if you only have 2 million DNS lookups / month]?
At 2M queries/mo our list pricing is $8 (https://nsone.net/support/billing/). Indeed our Biz Plan is $200 -- but that includes 24/7 support, 25M queries, and other bells & whistles. If you just need a little more volume, stick with the startup plan.
That said, indeed, in general we're more expensive than R53, Rage4, and various others, because of the depth of capabilities of the platform and the quality of the support we provide. But we're also pretty unique in giving away 1M queries free with no feature locking, so our most advanced stuff is available to everyone. If you're just after basic geo-routing at the lowest cost, we're happy to help but you may find other services cheaper; but if you intend to go beyond geo to complex failover arrangements, load shedding, weighting/stickiness, network-based fencing, etc, then do some tinkering with NSONE and let us know what you think. Feedback is always good. :)
Fair enough, I just glanced at the pricing pages. As this is intended for something that is ultimately a hobby of mine, it is more price sensitive than feature/support sensitive.
If I was trying to make a living at it, I'd seriously consider you even at $200/month.
The reason for my joy at the R53 news is the fact that w/o Geo it'd be worthless to me.
I didn't know your usage level! For small projects they've served me very well.
For larger projects then I'd rather host my own anyway, as I want pretty complex rules for handling queries from different regions, failover, number of IPs to return, and so on. We do exactly that with gdnsd and handle about 450m DNS queries per month.
The reason Route53 excited me is it has failover, healthchecks, etc. built in in a way I can sleep through things failing without anything breaking.
I don't actually use 2 million DNS queries / month, yet. But if I implemented DNS-based failover and shortened the TTL from the 12 hours I have now to something like 5 minutes? Ya, that'd clear 2 million pretty quickly. ;)
Nice. The final piece of the puzzle that I didn't even realize was missing until reading this announcement.
When I spin up a new idea, step one is to register the domain with my normal $7/year registrar. But from that point forward it's all AWS except for the step of manually copying back the nameservers from Route 53.
Sure, this is a bit more expensive but it's a no brainer from a lot of perspectives. First, it's Amazon so there's no fear of flakines (even of the whimsical negligent sort that Google specializes in). They're certainly going to be more reliable than the guys I'm with now (not because my guys aren't reliable; they're just not Amazon). And naturally, there's the bonus of having everything in one place and tied together.
But mostly there's the silly psychological reason: I have to manually renew a few of my domains every once in a while, sending off my card details for a few hundred more of my precious dollars and feeling the pain. With Amazon it'd be completely different. They're already pulling a grand or so out of my account every month. It's just business expenses, so a bit extra for domains can get nicely lost in the noise.
I get the feeling I might be doing a bunch of copy/pasting in the near future. Let's hope they have a good migration tool.
Never register your domain with the same company / account you have your hosting under. If you keep them independent and something catastrophic happens to your servers you'll still be able point the domain(s) somewhere else. If AWS goes down and takes the control panel with it you won't be able to do anything with your domain.
Unfortunately the TTL settings on top-level zones are less than friendly if your goal is to withstand a DNS provider outage by changing the registration. The TTLs on NS records in the ".com" zone are two days long. So when you log in to your registrar of choice and change the delegation, it's still going to be two days before all resolvers are using your new choice. You can improve things for most resolvers, by lowering the NS TTLs in your child-zone (though few do), but about 10% of resolvers are "parent-centric" and you'll just have to wait the two days.
Using multiple providers, but using no more than two authoritative nameservers from each provider [1], is probably the way to go if your goal is to withstand a full-provider DNS outage. Unfortunately when you do that, you have to also consider that if DNS is your tool for handling day-to-day problems like web-server failures; then every time you need to make a DNS change, you need all of your providers to reflect it reliably and quickly.
Or put another way; using multiple providers can lower your day to day availability, because of the increased probability that at least one of your providers is slow to make changes when you need it.
Full disclosure: I work on Route 53.
[1] Most resolvers will try 3 different name servers before giving up, so if you have 3 or more from any one provider in can be ineffective.
So in essence could one programmatically register domains and then kite them all automatically using their API? Kiting is when squatters buy domains look at traffic over a few days and drop the domain before the 4 day refund period is over.
This is a great option for anyone who's planning to use Route53 for DNS anyway, and also for no other reason than having a clean and easy way to just buy domains without all up-sell crap you get from GoDaddy et al.
Pricing is a big part of domains for me and AWS pricing seems a bit high to me. I'm also not sure on if whois privacy is offered or included? If it was then the domain price would be fine. I noticed a Route53 zone is included, but is it included in the price or costs additional? I had a domain with low traffic and it was $6/year just for DNS hosted zone so if it was included in the domain price I would probably move all of my domains, though whois privacy is still a big concern.
For the past few years I've been moving to Hover ($15) and then lately Badger ($10) as it is cheaper, but they both have whois privacy bundled in with the domain price as I think it is an important service. I previously worked on and maintained a domain registrar so these hit pretty close to home, but I'm still not really happy with any solution. It seems Amazon's model of getting pricing lower didn't really come through with this new offering just comparing to the current market.
Could hosted email be the next big thing AWS introduces? With as many people who are frustrated by lack of good options (Google Apps) it could be an interesting next stage for AWS (App Hosting, Domain Registrations, and Email Hosting), then I don't know what will happen to traditional hosting providers, but I think they will be trying to figure out how to stay relevant.
[1]: http://google.com/domains