At a Glance

Amazon began offering Route 53 DNS services on December 6th 2010. Route 53 can connect user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, or an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer. It can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. (Source)

Network

Route 53 provides a global network and lists 16 different locations across the United States, Europe, and Asia. There are 9 United States based network locations, 4 Europe based locations, and 3 Asia locations. (Source)

Uptime

As DNS services through Amazon have just launched, there are no reported incidents of downtime history.

Features

Route 53 has branded their DNS service as "highly available and scalable" DNS. Route 53 DNS services do not support DNS Failover however do allow for Round-Robin load balancing. Geographical DNS services are not supported currently but it appears support for this service will be added in the future. You can integrate Route 53 DNS services with any additional Amazon Web Service.

Web Management Portal

Route 53 provides a set of APIs that for creating and managing DNS records for your domains.

Customer Service / Technical Support

All Route 53 clients can take advantage of AWS Basic Support offers access to the Resource Center, Service Health Dashboard, Technical FAQs, and Developer Forums DNS packages come with 24/7 technical support. (Source)

Pricing

Pricing for Route 53 is $1.00 per hosted zone / month. Query pricing is $0.50 per million queries for the first 1 billion queries per month and $0.25 per million queries for any traffic levels over 1 billion queries per month.(Source)

There was no available information regarding potential overage charges.

Speed

Route 53 traffic speeds are competitive. Speed Charts