Amazon Route 53 - what do Hosted Zones and Queries mean exactly?

Question

This may seem like a very basic question, well, it is, but I am tad-bit confused after reading about Amazon Route 53 and the FAQs, and wanted to check if I am right.

• What are Hosted Zones? In layman-speak, it's the number of domains (example.com, domain.com, etc.) that you are going to be associating with Amazon Route 53. Right?

  So, with respect to the pricing, if I am only going to be using 1 domain, I'll only be charged $0.50 per month, correct?

• What are Queries? The number of times a domain is resolved? i.e. if someone visits domain.com it's generates many queries for the page itself, its images, stylesheets, JS files etc. right? So, the number of queries is roughly equal to the number of hits website and its content receive?

Answer 1

A hosted zone is a domain, basically. A single zone file also includes all subdomains though. E.g.: a.example.com, b.example.com and www.example.com would all be in the same zone file.

On the queries, yes it's how many requests that nameserver gets to resolve the domain name and it could be for a ping or an html file or an image or an ftp request, etc. Anytime it serves up a name resolution to anybody for anything is a query it served. As a note on that though, there is a TTL (time to live) setting on the zone file as well as DNS is built to cache so you don't get unnecessary requests. You could set that for a full 24 hours (86400 seconds) and every nameserver that gets a resolution will cache that answer and not re-query until that cache expires.