Route 53 Hosted Zone Not Forwarding

Tip #1: Your domain is public information, you want people to know about it. So don't be shy about mentioning the actual name of your domain. That way people can actually look, on the public side of things, at what is happening and maybe give better suggestions.

Yes, people break DNS all the time in all sorts of interesting way.

In your case, you say: "I...created a public hosted zone." If you mean that you went into Route 53 and explicitly created the zone, you may have ended up with 2 zones for your domain, as when you register a domain with Route 53 it defaults to setting up a zone for you. Or maybe you replaced the automatically created zone with one with a different set of nameservers. In any case, the first thing I'd check is that the Route 53 nameservers listed on the registration side of things match the nameservers in the Route 53 public zone that you want to be using. If you actually have multiple AWS accounts, etc., you probably should also look around to make sure that you don't have another zone for the same domain somewhere. That's more likely to confuse and break things than it is to be useful.

Some more on the subject at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigratingDNS.html

Edited by: JonTR on Oct 19, 2021 1:09 PM

Actually, I completely forgot that Route 53 creates the hosted zones for me, so I pre-emptively created one. Then I tried deleting it and remaking it after the fact.

I have a feeling you're right about the nameservers. I'll look into that first. I was hoping it was delayed propagation, but I registered a $5 one just to test it out, and it redirected me as expected.

I tried matching the name servers but still no luck. Since the domain was only $12, I went the nuclear route and deleted the DNS and hosted zone, registered the DNS again and let AWS make the hosted zone and now it's working.