Amazon Route 53

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide which is a very good book and which I downloaded for free from kindle. Route 53 works with quite a few other Amazon services like S3 or simple storage service & EC2 or elastic compute cloud. if you have a hosted website by someone else it will also work with that. Basically it lets you link a website which is already up and running to a DNS name or several DNS names. When you sign up part of the process is you get a phone call from Amazon and have to enter a pin number presumably to avoid people running loads of sites maybe for dodgy purposes like selling viagra. I think Amazon want to make sure there is a real person at the other end. If you have a website at more that one Amazon server farm they will direct traffic to the less busy one at any one time. They have a server farm serving most continents ie one in Ireland serving Europe & one in Singapore serving Asia. If you have the Elastic Load Balancing from Amazon the TTL or Time To Live which is the time before it gives up trying to connect you and assumes it's a bad line, anyway the TTL in ELB takes precendence over the one in Route 53 so if you need to adjust it you need to do it in ELB.