Amazon Expands Its Web Services with the Route 53 Domain Name Service

Amazon has been plowing ahead with Web Services, with no short amount of success. It's storage and computing services have proven very popular, but Amazon is expanding its array of cloud products with a DNS service based on the same principles it built its distributed computing offering. Route 53, as the service is named, is now in beta and offers a self-service DNS solution.

"Today we are introducing Amazon Route 53, a programmable Domain Name Service. You can now create, modify, and delete DNS zone files for any domain that you own," Amazon announced on its Web Services blog.

"You can do all of this under full program control—you can easily add and modify DNS entries in response to changing circumstances," the announcement added.

The new service will cost $1 per month for each set of domain names, or Hosted Zones as Amazon calls them. Beyond this fixed price, each million queries cost 50 cents, up to one billion queries per month, and 25 cents for a million queries after the initial billion.

Amazon says that most websites get an order of magnitude less DNS queries than they see page views.

Amazon's Route 53 works with the concept of Hosted Zones. Each hosted zone will store DNS records for the domain you chose. Once you've set up the hosted zone with the initial data regularly needed for DNS, you can start adding, deleting or changing records.

Amazon touts the performance as one of the main benefits of using Route 53, aside from the Web Services management and payment model. The company uses its computing network from around the world to make sure that queries can be answered by the servers closest to the user.

Another advantage, according to Amazon, is the fast propagation time for updates. It claims that Route 53 can get DNS changes updated much faster than traditional services.