Globally, our service handles billions of requests per month. This amounts to hundreds of millions of queries to our authoritative DNS servers, which are run by AWS’ Route 53.
Some dedicated DNS providers quote upwards of thousands of dollars for this level of DNS traffic.
How much do all those queries cost us per month? Hundreds? Thousands? More?
Nope. Under $10.
Queries are free with ELB + Route 53
That’s right. One amazing advantage of Route 53 is that all DNS queries to a record which is mapped to an AWS alias are free.
An AWS alias can be an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), a CloudFront distribution, an S3 bucket, or another Route 53 record set within the same hosted zone. So effectively you can easily set up your DNS records such that the vast majority of your DNS queries are hitting records mapped to aliases and get all those queries for free.
Better still, there is no limit!
Rock on, AWS.
