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I had a domain registered (www.aksinin.com) and a website hosted (97.74.215.225) at GoDaddy, but due to some limitations, had to migrate to AWS.

The domain plan ended first, so I migrated it to Route 53. It seems everything went smoothly, as the domain continues to be properly registered, only via Amazon, and points to the website hosted at GoDaddy. Cool.

Then, the hosting plan ended, so I moved the website to an EC2 Instance (52.208.50.228), and added an A record to point to the new IP:

aksinin.com.      A      52.208.50.228              TTL 300    (5 minutes)
aksinin.com.      NS     ns-1147.awsdns-15.org.     TTL 172800 (48 hours)
                         ns-564.awsdns-06.net.
                         ns-1614.awsdns-09.co.uk.
                         ns-490.awsdns-61.com.
aksinin.com.      SOA    ns-1147.awsdns-15.org.     TTL 900    (15 minutes)
                         awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com.
www.aksinin.com.  CNAME  aksinin.com                TTL 300    (5 minutes)

(Only the first line is new; the rest didn't change since the domain migration). Now, I'm no DNS expert, but it seems to me that after 2 days, the change should have propagated (custom ISP caches notwithstanding), right? But more than a week has passed, and still:

nslookup www.aksinin.com
97.74.215.225 # Old IP... OK, maybe my ISP is weird.

nslookup www.aksinin.com 8.8.8.8
97.74.215.225 # Old IP... That's bad. In Google we trust. :(

nslookup www.aksinin.com ns-1147.awsdns-15.org.
52.208.50.228 # WOOHOO YES NEW IP! Except... Why isn't it propagating?

Another point is that by now, both my domain registration and the website hosting at GoDaddy have expired, so I was a little worried the website may become inaccessible (if the DNS keeps pointing to the old IP, which GoDaddy can reallocate to something else or shut down entirely). The website is still up - which may be a grace period by GoDaddy, I guess - but this... "fixation" of configurations leads me to think there's something else I should do, change or update; like some "higher" DNS authority still actively thinks the old IP is the correct one.

Any ideas?

Dan Gittik
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2 Answers2

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Turns out, Route 53 serves several purposes:

  1. A DNS server (or rather, a way to configure Amazon's DNS servers).
  2. A domain registrar.

What I did was to configure some of Amazon's DNS servers to resolve my domain to my new IP; and indeed, asking these DNS servers directly yielded the correct address.

But what I did not configure was the domain registrar. If I understand correctly, DNS serves which are not specifically configured to resolve my domain (that is, all the DNS servers in the world, except the 4 I did configure) - have to ask some higher authority for help in resolving my domain, and that authority eventually leads to the domain registrar, which holds pointers to DNS servers that actually "know" this domain. And since I haven't updated these pointers, the registrar kept redirecting to GoDaddy's DNS servers, which kept returning the old IP (since I haven't updated them, nor could I once my plan expired). Once I updated the registrar to point to the 4 Amazon DNS servers I did configure (see this answer as to how), the change propagated in a matter of minutes. Hooray!

Community
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Dan Gittik
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As per my understanding When you change the NamseServer from GoDaddy to AWS Route 53 , Godaddy NameServer[NS] has to update Parent NameServer for updating the Custome Nameserver, which is AWS NameServer[NS] correct me if I am wrong. I was having the same problem a year back but my issue was regarding page redirection to GoDaddy default ip.

How NameServer Works

Vardhman Patil
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