Getting Ready for Putting your Website Live

Before you turn on your website, you must transfer the dns (nameservers) for your website into Amazon's Web Services using their ROUTE 53 service.  This is so that the following urls will bring users to your website:

• http://yourdomainname.com
• http://www.yourdomainname.com
• https://yourdomainname.com
• https://www.yourdomainname.com

Our understanding is that there is a nominal charge for using this service (approx €1 per month).

Going forward, you may use this personal AWS account for other optional services for your website (e.g. sending emails from your own email server).

Note: other services (eg email, registering of the domain) can remain with the existing provider.  It is only the dns (nameservers) that you need to move.  

Preparation for Go Live - Moving your DNS settings into Amazons Route 53

Before you go live, you will need to host your DNS settings in Amazon Web Services using Route 53 - click here to find out more about Route 53.  To set this up should only take 30 minutes but it needs to be done an experienced IT person.  This is because it requires migrating your current DNS settings into Route 53 and if they are set up wrongly (e.g. a misspelling of a word), your email or website (or possibly something else using your DNS settings) could go down temporarily.

To do this, take the following steps

1. Create an Amazon Web Services account following the steps in this article:
   https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/create-and-activate-aws-account/.  You only need the basic account.  You do not need support.
2. As per the article, it will take up to 24 hours for your account to be created - you will need to enter your credit card details which will be charged monthly - the following article explains the costs for using Route 53 but our understanding is that the charge will be nominal (e.g. €1 per month):
   https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
3. You will need to get an experienced IT person to migrate your DNS settings into your Route 53 account.  The following article explains how to do this:
   https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/migrate-dns-domain-in-use.html
4. When completed, your ROUTE 53 account should have the following:
   
   
   
   And when HOSTED ZONES is clicked, it should look like the following:
   
   
   And when you click on YOURDOMAINNAME.COM, it should list all your current DNS settings.
   
   
5. When all settings have been moved to Route 53, you need to point your domain name to Route 53's DNS servers.  By clicking on your HOSTED ZONE in the above screen, the right side of the screen will show up displaying a list of 4 NAME SERVERS.  You need to get your DNS servers re-pointed to these 4 servers which will mean that Route 53 takes over for your DNS settings going forward.
   
   

On Go Live

When you are ready to go live, take the following extra steps:

1. Before you go live, contact the help desk to ensure that you have 2 ssls created (NOTE that your abcommerce website may already be set up with an ssl cert but you need to check with the help desk first to esnure that the 2nd ssl cert has also been created).  The 2 ssl certs are for (1) yourdomianname.com + (2) www.yourdomainname.com - the help desk will give you 2 values for "NAME" and "VALUE" and you just need to add these into ROUTE 53 as follows (so that AWS can complete the creation of your 2 ssl certificates):
   1. The Help Desk will give you 2 values which look something like these:
      NAME: _1234567890e1c708c8f0336f.yourdomainname.com.
      VALUE: _78s89asd97as7da89d78a.abcdefgh.acm-validations.aws
   2. Go into Route 53 and click on your hosted zone
   3. Click on Create Record Set and enter the values similar to the following screen using name/value give to you by the Help Desk - and click Create
   4. Then let the Help Desk know so that they can finish setting up your 2 ssl certificates
      
2. Once the Help Desk confirm your 2 ssl certs are installed, you are ready to go live.  For go live, you will be given the location of your load balancer which will look something like this:
   abclive1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com
3. When you are ready to go live, ensure that your TTLs are reduced down to 15 minutes (i.e. 900 seconds) so that any change you make will be updated across the internet within 15 minutes.  This will also allow you to rollback if there is an issue within 15 minutes.  NOTE that once your website is live, you should change these back to 1 hour (i.e. 3,600 seconds).
4. Then wait 24 hours for your TTLs change to take effect and then update your web records to the following 2 DNS settings:
   
   yourdomainname.com ===> ALIAS ===> abclive1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com
   
   www.yourdomainname.com ===> CNAME ===> yourdomainname.com
   
   To set these up, just click Create Record Set for each of the 2 settings and fill in the screen similar to the following 2 screens using the load balancer that the Help Desk gave you and click Create.
   
   For "yourdomainname.com":
   
   
   For "www.yourdomainname.com":
   
   
5. The final settings should look similar to the following: