in Route 53 I need to set up a way for all traffic to example.com to forward to www. example.com

Question

In route 53 i have www.example.com set up as a cname forwarding to a webpage and it is valid and working.  all i need is to create the forwarding in route 53 to send the traffic from example.com to www.example.com.  i set up a cname with an alias that sends the traffic from example.com to www.example.com but it does not seem to work.  when i go to example.com it goes to a "were having trouble finding that site page"    please note i am not a technical person so its greatly appreciated if you could answer the question in simpler terms.  thanks for all your help on this!

Answer

Hi there

The short answer is you can do this with Route53 using whats known as an [Alias record](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/resource-record-sets-choosing-alias-non-alias.html).  Please see this blog post for the instructions: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/route-53-redirect-to-another-domain/ If its a valid alias target, then you should not be using a CNAME like you mentioned in your post.

For example, if you register the DNS name example.com, the zone apex is example.com. You can't create a CNAME record for example.com, but you can create an alias record for example.com that routes traffic to www.example.com (**as long as the record type for www.example.com is not of type CNAME**).

Note: this method can be used only to redirect resources that are valid alias targets (ALB, CLoudFront, Etc)

If not, you can use a combination of Route53 and S3 to do the redirect.  See this blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/redirect-domain-route-53/

in Route 53 I need to set up a way for all traffic to example.com to forward to www. example.com

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