How do I troubleshoot and resolve website access issues in Amazon Route 53?

Resolution

To resolve access issues with domains that you host in Amazon Route 53, check the domain registrar status, Amazon Route 53 configuration, and DNS resolution.

Check the domain's status

Use a WHOIS lookup to check the domain's status. If the domain status is clientHold or serverHold, then the domain doesn't resolve. Contact your domain registrar to remove the hold. 

If your domain registrar is Route 53, then contact AWS Support. If your domain registrar is a third party, then contact them.

To determine who the domain registrar is, run the following command:

whois domain_name |grep 'Registrar'

Confirm that your name servers match

Verify that the name servers that you listed with your domain registrar match the name servers that you associated with your Route 53 hosted zone. If the name servers don't match, then your domain might not resolve.

To check whether the name servers match, complete the following steps:

1. Open the Amazon Route 53 console.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Hosted zones.
3. On the Hosted zones page, select a hosted zone.
4. Choose View details.
5. In the Records table, select the name server record.
6. On the Record details tab, under Values, verify that your name server matches your name server record.
   Note: To find the AWS assigned name servers for your hosted zone, See Getting the name servers for a public hosted zone.

Check for incorrect registrar information for the domains that you registered in Route 53. Choose the Registered domains page, and then note the domain names. Run a dig command with the domain names. If the name server details on the registrar are incorrect, then you receive a "SERVFAIL" response in the command's output.

To resolve this issue, update the registrar with correct name servers. If your domain registrar is Route 53, then see Adding or changing name servers or glue records.

Check your domain's DNSSEC configuration

If you activated DNSSEC on your domain, then verify that you correctly configured the DNSKEY and DS records. The DNSKEY and DS records must match between your domain registrar and your Route 53 hosted zone. If they don't match and your domain registrar is Route 53, then change the DS record value on the registrar. If the records match and you still can't access the domain, then contact AWS Support.

Verify that the domain name record is in the public hosted zone

Your Route 53 public hosted zone must have a record for your domain name. If a record doesn't exist, then you receive an "NXDOMAIN" error. To resolve this issue, update your records.

Run commands to troubleshoot DNS resolution issues

Note: In the following commands, replace domain-name with your domain name. For the telnet command, replace port-number with your port number.

Check the DNS resolution status

To check your DNS resolution status, run the command for your operating system (OS). 

For Linus or Unix, run the dig command:

dig domain-name

For Windows, use the nslookup command:

nslookup domain-name

Check for network or connectivity issues

If you still can't access your website, then run the following telnet command to check for network or connectivity issues:

telnet domain-name port-number

If the command's output shows that the connection timed out or was refused, then check your network configuration. The network configuration includes resources that you associated with the domain name, such as your Application Load Balancer, Amazon CloudFront distribution, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

Run the curl command to check the HTTP response from your website's domain:

curl -ivL https://domain-name

If the command's output shows an SSL handshake error, then check the certificate on the application server and associated resources.

If the output shows an HTTP response that isn't 200 OK, then check application logs and your load balancer configuration.

Note: In CloudFront, check listener rules and the AWS WAF configuration.

Related information

Troubleshooting Amazon Route 53