How do I delete a Route 53 hosted zone?

Resolution

Important: You can't undo the deletion of a hosted zone. After you delete a zone, the assigned name servers don't respond to the domain name queries.

To delete a Route 53 hosted zone, complete the following steps:

1. Turn off DNSSEC signing on the hosted zone.
2. Delete any records associated with the hosted zone, except for the default start of authority (SOA) and name server (NS) records.
   Note: If you don't delete the records before you delete the hosted zones, then you get following error: "Error occurred Before you can delete a hosted zone, you must first delete all resource record sets except the NS and SOA resource record sets for the zone apex. (HostedZoneNotEmpty 400: The specified hosted zone contains non-required resource record sets and so cannot be deleted.)"
3. Delete your public hosted zone or private hosted zone.

If you used service discovery to create your hosted zone, then you can't use the Route 53 console to delete the zone. Instead, use the AWS Cloud Map console or a servicediscovery API call. For more information, see How do I delete a Route 53 hosted zone created by service discovery?

Note: Deleted hosted zones no longer route traffic. If you create a new hosted zone for your domain later, then update the NS record to route traffic to the new zone.

Related information

Working with public hosted zones

Working with private hosted zones