None of this is new. S3 has been around since 2006, Route 53 since 2010, and Terraform since 2016. This isn’t even the best way to do it. This is simply iteration 1 for getting a website accessible. There are many improvements to be made here
Starting with a basic index.html we need to be able to serve that to the world, there are a few things that are needed to make that happen
So, Amazon Lightsail is a nice idea. You can host all kinds of things with it, pretty simply and pretty cheaply (oh, hi this website!) Something I found to be missing was the explanation of how to get DNS to work correctly. I wrote it off to updating my NS records after the initial response had been cached. So, waited patiently for 48 hours long hours. No joy.
Re-read the documentation. Yes, all happy that I’d followed that. Still nothing. Deleted the zone in Lightsail to re-create it. Still nothing. Well, this is frustrating!
What I found to be missing (and missing from the documentation) is that if you update your NS records in a Route 53 hosted domain, you have to also delete the hosted zone in Route 53. I only found this by chance when I noticed that the updated NS records I’d created didn’t match what I was seeing in the Route 53 control panel. How annoying! The Amazon documentation would work beautifully if you register your domain with another registrar, but falls short when using their own services. Continue reading Amazon Lightsail and DNS
