Technical Steps to Go Live

Before you turn on your website, we suggest that you transfer the dns (nameservers) for your website into Amazon's Web Services using their ROUTE 53 service.  This ensures that the url without the www will also be able to reach the website ie the https://yourdomainname.com as well as http://www.yourdomainname.com. This is needed because the website uses a load balancer so that additional web servers can be added were needed.   AWS allows you to point the A record of your domain to a load balancer. 

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.  

Click here if you would like to find out more about Route 53.

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

The technical steps on the dns (from step 3 onwards) should only take approx 30 minutes but it needs to be done an experienced IT person.  It done wrongly, your email, website (or possibly something else using your DNS settings) could go down.

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 to pay for support.  We suggest that you 
   • use an email address that is not on the domain as the root user of the account so if your domain is abc.ie the use an email address that is not a @abc.ie email address.  
   • Set up a user for magico will full administrator access.  This will allow Magico to help you with any technical queries you have around the domain. Magico will provide you with instructions on how to do this.  Ensure to send login and password securely.  Do not send in the same email.
   • Ensure that you have an user on the AWS account with full administrator access where the email address is not an email address from the domain.
   • Ensure that the email address being used as the root user of the account is being monitored so that you will see emails from AWS, eg if the credit card used to pay the account has expired.
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.
   
   
6. Ensure that your domain has a domain record for the dmarc on the new nameservers.
7. Ensure that your domain has a DKIM for sending email from the AWS account hosting the website on the new nameservers.  Contact Magico Helpdesk to set this up for you. They will provide you with domain records to add to the domain.

On Go Live

1. When you are ready to go live, take the following extra steps:
2. 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 ensure that the 2nd ssl cert has also been created).  The 2 ssl certs are for (1) yourdomainname.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):
   • The Help Desk will give you 2 values which look something like these:
     NAME: _1234567890e1c708c8f0336f.yourdomainname.com.
     VALUE: _78s89asd97as7da89d78a.abcdefgh.acm-validations.aws
   • Go into Route 53 and click on your hosted zone
   • 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
   • Then let the Help Desk know so that they can finish setting up your 2 ssl certificates
     

At Go live

1. 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).
2. Wait for the 15 minute ttls to take effect.  Magico will give you the location of your load balancer which will look something like this:  abclive1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com.  Update your web records to the following 2 DNS settings:
   
   yourdomainname.com ===> ALIAS ===> abclive1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com
   
   www.yourdomainname.com ===> CNAME ===> yourdomainname.com
   
   The load balancer is a classic/application load balancer.
    
3. The final settings should look similar to the following: