DNS propagation after switch from Lightsail to EC2 / R53

Good Afternoon,

I had a small Lightsail instance that I was running a small web server on for the past year, with a domain that I had purchased. Everything was done through AWS. Domain registration in R53, and DNS in the Lightsail menu's.

This past week I had decided to upgrade this webserver and decided to switch to EC2 in order to facilitate future growth and just for the exposure to more of the AWS systems.

• I built the server out and it works
• All VPC / Routing is correct and I can access the site through it's Public (Elastic) IP.
• The Domain was already registered in Route 53 and is still active
• I deleted the Lightsail DNS Zone and created a Hosting Zone in R53 and created an A record for a subdomain of my domain and pointed it to the server.

This did not work, and after some troubleshooting I went back to Lightsail and recreated the old DNS Zone and it immediately worked and resolved to the old server. I had read that you need a base domain A record so I created that (not a subdomain, pointed at the same IP since it's the only resource available) and that has not worked either.

I understand that this sometimes takes time due to the old records TTL values, but using dig, nslookup, and whatsmydns I am not resolving to any older IP's, it's just not resolving at all and failing.

Currently in Route53 I have: NS record unchanged from default SOA record unchanged from default A record for my domain to my elastic IP A record for my subdomain to my elastic IP

Is there anything that I am missing? Is there some kind of DNS ownership transfer that I have to do between Lightsail and Route53 or is it all the same since it's AWS? Lightsail always feels slightly like a slightly different entity due to it's different UI but I'm not sure if that's the case or not.

Is there anything else I can do to check in the meantime outside of waiting for TTLs to expire? The TTLs from the Lightsail DNS are a mystery to me but I'm assuming it uses the same 2 day ones that R53 use. But even with that should it even matter the TTL on the A records are 300 and that's the only ones who's changed should have been significant (IP from Lightsail Static to Elastic IP tied to EC2).

Help me please! Thanks.