# Amazon Route 53

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/dns-hosting/amazon-route53/

AWS's authoritative DNS and domain registration service, billed per hosted zone and per million queries, with a 100% uptime commitment.

## Who it suits

A 100% uptime commitment on your nameservers, which only Google matches here, plus the AWS integrations — alias records to load balancers and CloudFront, health checks, and IAM on the zone itself.

Consider something else if You want DNS to be free. $0.50 a zone and $0.40 per million queries is small until you run hundreds of domains, and Cloudflare and bunny.net charge nothing for either at any volume.

## iScore

67 / 100 (80% interval 58–76), rank 4 of 5 in dns-hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every dns-hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/dns-hosting/amazon-route53/alternatives/

- Price: 22 (0–50), weight 36%, 2 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_offer_type
- Capabilities: 100 (94–100), weight 29%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: edge_network
- Trust and compliance: 85 (78–91), weight 21%, 1 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: dnssec
- Evidence: 88 (88–88), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: No ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonRoute53/current/index.json), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: $0.50 per hosted zone per month for the first 25, then $0.10 for each additional zone. Extra record sets within a zone are $0.0015 a month each. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonRoute53/current/index.json), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Per hosted zone and per million queries, with the zone rate falling fivefold after the first 25 and the query rate halving after the first billion. Health checks and DNS firewall rules are metered separately again. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonRoute53/current/index.json), read 2026-09-15)

### Infrastructure

- Uptime SLA: 100%. AWS defines the monthly uptime percentage as 100% minus the minutes a hosted zone was unavailable, and any month below 100% earns a service credit — 10% down to 99.99%, 25% down to 99.95%. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/route53/sla/), read 2026-09-15)

### Observability

- Query price: $0.40 per million resolver queries for the first billion a month, $0.20 per million above it. Queries to latency-based-routing alias records are free of charge. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonRoute53/current/index.json), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare DNS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/cloudflare-dns-vs-amazon-route53/)
- [Amazon Route 53 vs bunny.net DNS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/bunny-dns-vs-amazon-route53/)
- [Amazon Route 53 vs DNSimple](https://inetgeek.com/compare/dnsimple-vs-amazon-route53/)