Hot Swapping Godaddy’s DNS

I’ve been setting up a WordPress site on AWS, and preparing for a hot swap of the DNS. I’ve run tests on the system, all the functionality has ported over, all that’s left to do now is switch the DNS, but there’s a snag. Cloudfront is serving the site, we’re using Godaddy, and they won’t let you point the Apex (A) record at a Cloudfront distribution.

The only solution is to setup a hosted zone on AWS Route 53, and point Godaddy at those name servers. I’ve done it before, but not when the DNS zone has MX, TXT, and SRV records. I tried researching whether this would be okay, but there was no simple answer. So here’s my experience!

Just Do It

First, I went into Godaddy, went to my managed domain location, clicked this Action button and Exported my Zone File:

This gave me a complete list of my current DNS Zone setup on Godaddy. Nice. I saved it and loaded my Route 53 hosted zone, clicked on import Zone file, faffed around with it a little bit to include only the parts I need annndd, tadah! My DNS records were successfully ported.

Now it was time for the moment of truth; I had everything that mattered, so, I crossed my finger🤞🏻, and changed those nameservers!

I clicked through the interface to the nameservers dialogue and pasted in the names of my AWS-gifted nameservers. Word to the wise: At first, I tried keeping the full stop at the end of the server names, but it isn’t necessary, DELETE.

I saved the changes, typed my emailed code in to confirm, and that’s it. The nameservers have been swapped.

What Happened

Well, so far… it’s worked! I’ve loaded up the site, and the certificate has been swapped to the one I made in Amazon Certificate Manager, great success.

I’ve also checked the email service; it seems to work, too. So far, so golden. There are some services like TLS listed too, but as my certificate is working I’m going to assume they’re all good, or they don’t matter now. For my next trick, perhaps I should delete them and see if any chaos ensues 🤔

My Advice

If you can’t find the answers you seek, run the experiment yourself, hope for the best, and for forgiving team members! I’ll update this if it all goes sideways. Cheers!