Amazon Route 53 offers domain registration services and if you would like to keep your domains together like I do, you can transfer your current domain names easily.
In the past, I bough some domains from GoDaddy and generally use Amazon Route 53 as my DNS service. It is time to renew some of our domains and I decided to move them to AWS as they are extended 1 year automatically after the transfer. This will allow me to manage my domain names, as well as the services behind them all together on AWS. I will describe the process as a reference.
What are the requirements on AWS?
First of all, your domain should be registered in your current registrar at least 60 days ago. It does not matter whether you bought, renewed or transferred, the same applies. This action should also be at least 60 days ago.
Your domain tld (.com,.co.uk, etc.) should be supported on AWS. Our domain has
.comtld, but if it had an unsupported tld such as.com.tr, we would not be able to move it to AWS.Some top-level domains cannot be transferred until some changes, such as domain name owner, are completed. Your domain should not be one of them.
If you have a regular
.comdomain name that you bought it at least 60 days ago and it has a valid status, you should be fine.Your domain should not be locked for transfer, pending for transfer, delete or in redemption period.
Now, we need to connect to our GoDaddy account and unlock transfer for our domain.
Unlock domain transfer on GoDaddy
Log in GoDaddy and go to My Products and click on Manage under the domain name that will be transferred to access Domain Settings.
On Domain Settings page, scroll to Additional Settings and click on Edit next to Domain lock. 
Then, make it off and the result should be as below. It may last for a few minutes for GoDaddy to process this change and send an email to the domain owner informing that the domain status changed.
After receiving Domain Status Notification email from GoDaddy as the domain owner, we are good to go.
Get an Authorization Code from GoDaddy to Authorize AWS
We need to get an authorization code from GoDaddy to authorize AWS to transfer our domain to Route 53. We will use this code on AWS Management Console while making domain transfer request.
Again, on Domain Settings page, under Additional Settings, click on Get authorization code as I described below.
After this, GoDaddy will send another email to the domain owner that has the authorization code for transfer.
Requesting Transfer on Amazon Route 53 Console
Using the authorization code we received from GoDaddy, we will request a domain transfer from AWS. Then AWS will handle all necessary communication between GoDaddy.
Sign in AWS Management Console and go to Amazon Route 53 console. Under Domains, click on Registered Domains and then Transfer Domain. Enter the domain name and select the tld from the list and click Check. 
In this example, I chose a domain name we do not use currently. Therefore, I did not transfer my DNS settings to Amazon Route 53. Normally, before doing any of this, we should transfer DNS settings to Amazon Route 53 not to break anything during transfer. Amazon Route 53 display a warning message and asks us to confirm the change by clicking the check box as below.
Then we click Add to cart and it will be displayed as below.
As you can see, we can add other domains if we need and handle all of this at once. For now, I will not add any and click Continue at the bottom of the page.
On the opening page, enter the authorization code received for your domain to Authorization code field. AWS asks how to manage DNS. If you moved your DNS to Amazon Route 53 before this select second option and choose your hosted zone.
Click Continue and fill in the registrant information form. As you can see below, we can choose to hide our information for free. This means that when people search WhoIs database, our information will be hidden publicly and only provided to ICANN for registration purposes. AWS will replace emails with unique emails and will forward to our email address if we need to be accessed as the domain owner.
Click Continue once again and review your information on the opening page. If everything is OK, click check box to approve Terms and Conditions and click Complete Purchase.
Authorizing Domain Transfer for Amazon Route 53
After completing above, you will see your domain names in Pending Transfer section as below.
AWS will send an email to the domain owner to authorize the transfer. Open the email and click the link AWS sent. Then select Yes on the opening page and click Submit.
As you can see the status changes in Pending Transfers.
Approving the Transfer on GoDaddy
Now we have one thing remaining, approving the transfer on GoDaddy. After completing domain transfer request on Amazon Route 53, GoDaddy will send an email to approve the transfer within minutes.
Go to My Domains on your GoDaddy account and click view details under Pending transfer out
Then select your domain name and click Accept or Decline
Select Accept on the opening form and click ``.
Now, the only thing remaining is to wait for the transfer is completed.
Completion of the Transfer
Once all messaging between AWS and GoDaddy is completed, AWS sends the domain owner to inform that transferring the domain to Route 53 succeeded. GoDaddy sends also an email they are sorry.
After finishing, we can see that our domain is listed under Registered domains on our Amazon Route 53 console.
A Note on DNS Settings
If you need to transfer a domain name you use currently, you should transfer your DNS setting to Amazon Route 53 first and wait for 48 hours at least to be sure that your DNS changes propogated all over the world. Afterwards, transferring domain registration to Amaozn Route 53 will handle DNS settings seemlessly and no downtime would occur.
Conclusion
Amazon Route 53 is a very good choice as a DNS service with lots of abilities that we may discuss in later posts. AWS provides domain registration service on Amazon Route 53 and if you would like to move from GoDaddy to AWS, I hope this post will make it easier for you. Actually whole process lasts less than one hour.
Thanks for reading!
