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How to Avoid Route 53 $0.50 / Month Charge per Hosting Zone using Free CloudFront Distribution

Step-by-step instructions to reduce your costs to $0 for any domain.

Max Rohde

Max Rohde

— 3 min read
How to Avoid Route 53 $0.50 / Month Charge per Hosting Zone using Free CloudFront Distribution
Who wouldn't like to have AWS costs reduced for our smaller accounts!?Who wouldn't like to have AWS costs reduced for our smaller accounts!?

AWS Route 53 charges US$0.50 per hosted zone per month.

Even when we otherwise use AWS services sparingly - Route 53 charges a fixed amount

This can quickly add up if you have multiple domains – especially when using different AWS accounts for dev, uat and prod; which each will need their own hosted zone.

Thankfully AWS has recently release flat-rate pricing for CloudFront distributions, and one of the included services for the free-tier plan is a Route 53 hosted zone 🥳

Using CloudFront distributions, you can reduce our costs for hosted zones to $0.00.

Much better when we can replace the $0.50 from Route 53 with our free CloudFront plan

And, best of all, you don't need to change our application for this!

You don't need to update your existing CloudFront distributions – you can simply create a new one and point it to any subdomain in the hosted zone.

Here is how to do it:

  1. Head to the AWS Console and Open CloudFront / Distributions
  2. Click [Create Distribution]
  3. Select the Free plan and click [Next]
  1. Choose any name and description you like
  2. IMPORTANT: For Domain, provide a subdomain of the hosted zone domain in Route 53 you would like to offset the costs for.
    1. For instance, if your domain is mydomain.com - you can choose offset.mydomain.com
  3. When you did everything right, you will see the following confirmation:
  1. For specify origin, choose Other
  2. Provide any domain / path you like. E.g. point back to your main domain.
  3. Enable rate limiting on the security page and go [Next]
  4. Create a new TLS certificate
    1. IMPORTANT: if you have the choice to use an already existing one, I would recommend to not choose it and instead create a new one. This way, we are not interfering with any other setup made in the account.
  5. Now you can create the distribution.
  6. Once the distribution is created, click [Manage plan] under billing.
  1. Look for the line 'Route 53 DNS: [your hosted zone domain]' - if that is there, you won't be charged the US$0.50 per month anymore for this hosted zone 🥳

That's all we need to do. If you are already using CloudFront, you could of course also change any existing CloudFront distribution to use the flat-rate pricing.

But good luck with that! You will likely find it is not possible out of the box – due to many features in CloudFront not being covered in the flat-rate pricing.

And if you use any of these features, the option to select the free plan will be grayed out:

Much easier to create a new distribution under a different sub-domain!

If you are considering deploying a Next.js based project using CloudFront, please consider my free starter templates:

I haven't updated them to use the flat-rate CloudFront distribution but will likely do so in the future - please raise an issue if you are interested in this feature and this will surely motivate me to get to it quicker.

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