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I'm trying to get my godaddy.com domain name pointed to my Amazon EC2 instance and am having some difficulty.

I created a hosted zone for my domain name on route 54 and set the namesevers up as the "delegation set" servers mentioned on Route 53 (ns-xxx.awsdns-xx.net, etc). But despite that it's not working.

One thing I'm wondering is... do I need to associate the domain name / zone to a particular EC2 instance or EC2 elastic IP? If so I don't know how to do that.

Any ideas?

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  • What does your DNS entry look like right now?
    – Kruug
    Mar 27, 2013 at 15:22
  • Route 53 has four NS records and one SOA record for my domain if that's what you mean.
    – neubert
    Mar 27, 2013 at 15:40
  • Maybe I need to make my an A name record for my elastic IP? Do EC2 elastic IPs change? Maybe I could use the elastic IPs public DNS in a PTR record? idk. Since it can take a while for these changes to propagate out it's hard to test..
    – neubert
    Mar 27, 2013 at 15:47
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    The A record should be the IP address that you want the domain to point to. Use this to check for propagation: whatsmydns.net
    – Kruug
    Mar 27, 2013 at 15:49
  • That worked - thanks! If you post it as an answer instead of a comment I'll accept it!
    – neubert
    Mar 27, 2013 at 16:07

2 Answers 2

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Make sure the A-record of your DNS is pointing to the public-facing IP address of your server.

Generally you'll get three columns:

  • Host Name <- How users will get to your site (@, www, subdomain, etc)
  • Address <- where the record should point (generally the IP address of the server)
  • Record Type <- Typically this will be an A record

Using the @ symbol for your hostname will allow users to get to your site via http://domain.com. If you want http://www.domain.com, you will have to set up another record with www as the Host Name.

To check propagation, as well as making sure the record points to the proper address, you can use tools such as http://www.whatsmydns.net/

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  • Do you need to update the name servers as well? What should the nameservers be pointing to?
    – Vandesh
    Nov 22, 2016 at 20:16
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First configure an IP address for your DNS settings

  1. In AWS select Elastic IP’s in the left hand menu.
  2. In the top menu under “Addresses”, click “Allocate New Address”.
  3. Ensure “EIP used in” is set to “EC2″ and click “Yes, Allocate”.
  4. Click the tick box next to the new IP address that has appeared in the main left pane and press the “Associate Address” button in the top menu.
  5. In the “Instance” drop down, select your webserver that we set up previously and click “Yes, Associate”.

That’s it for management on the AWS side of things, however, please note that now when you access your webserver through SSH, SFTP or MySQL, your public DNS address that you were using for the connection will have changed. At this point it is probably better to just use the new IP address to connect that you have just associated with your webserver.

Setting up your DNS

  1. Login to your godaddy account and go to domain manager.
  2. Click launch infront of your domain.
  3. click on tab of DNS Zone File and click on Edit.
  4. chage the IP to the new one (you created by Elastic IP system) infront of @ in host section and save changes.
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    I'm for this answer. Depending on your application, it might be worth setting up an Elastic IP as this will allow you to re-route your traffic incase anything happens to your instance.
    – Oliver Tappin
    Oct 1, 2014 at 8:44
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    the only thing missing from this answer is the record type, which I learned from the accepted answer. You'll want to make two A records, one for the bare domain and another for www.yourdomain.com. Allow time for propagation.
    – Harry Moreno
    Jul 21, 2018 at 20:13

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