Pointing Route 53 to Cloudfront correctly

Question

I have an s3 bucket with content in it, which can be browsed if you type in the s3 bucket name (lets call it mydomain.com.au.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com, and trust me, you can get there). I also have two cloudfront distributions, which you can see below:

Sorry about the redacting, but I'm not sure what risks I'm putting my client to. As you can see, they are CNAME aliases.

You can also browse these domains and they serve the right content, so I know that the distributions are working.

I have set up two alias records in Route 53, which are pictured below:

Different docs say different things, but I gather that I create 2 alias records for the cloudfront distribution, one for the domain and one for the www.domain. When I try navigating to the host via either domain url, mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com, I get nothing at all. A ping to the domain says: "Unknown host" Are there any additional steps I need to take? What may be important is that the domain recently came from godaddy, although Amazon maintains that all 14 steps of the transfer have happened, but its been a few days, I think something is definitely wrong.

EDIT - So colde pointed me to what was going wrong which is that a whois reveals that the name servers holding the domain record

ns66.domaincontrol.com
ns65.domaincontrol.com

are from tucows and not amazon at all. So, for all I lknow the cloudfront set up is probably OK, and I need to chase up AWS to find out why the job isn't complete. Thanks everyone for your help.

Answer 1

You domain doesn't point to Route 53. A simple whois of your domains says: Name Server: ns66.domaincontrol.com Name Server: ns65.domaincontrol.com

It also says your registrar is Tucows, which doesn't seem to align with it being moved to AWS.

Generally, Route 53 nameservers are easily identifiable, here are a the setting from one of my domains: Name Server: ns-1408.awsdns-48.org Name Server: ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk Name Server: ns-93.awsdns-11.com Name Server: ns-944.awsdns-54.net

You don't necessarily have to transfer your domain to Route 53, as long as you point the nameservers to the correct ones (you can find them listed as NS records in your zone). You can then still continue to pay your domain through Godaddy or tucows or whatever.