1. My domains all predate Amazon becoming a registrar. I registered my first domain in 1997. I register them for 5-10 years at a time. There's no simplicity benefit in transferring and paying more.

2. Too many eggs in one basket. I prefer to minimize (a) the chances of losing an account/asset and (b) the impact if it happens. If Amazon drops me, or has a long-lasting outage, I can re-build everything I run on another host and point the domains there in an afternoon. Not so if Amazon also owns the domains and hosts the DNS.

Probably not a good enough benefit in the age of letsencrypt but you do get free certs if you're with R53.

Not to mention the dynamic alias records, automated certificate validations and auto-renewing, and the very excellent integrations with other AWS services.

People like making life harder for themselves /shrug

If disaster recovery or separation of duties makes you shrug, I’d recommend some basic risk management and security training.

Most decent registrars have APIs allowing you to do all of this with just a few lines of code in a script.

You can use ACM for free without Route 53, it just takes manual effort to set up verification records.

I would suggest Cloudflare registrar + CDN + DDoS protection. Keep all the backend stuff on AWS.

Better yet, keep it on Lightsail, it has fixed pricing plans for containers ($7 per mo), VPS ($3.5), database ($15), blob store ($3 per 100GB), and disk ($1 per 10GB). Lightsail can peer into (same region) regular VPC as well for $1 per 100GB ingress+egress.

That’s ridiculously expensive.

Apply my comment in the context of "keep all the backend stuff on AWS." Of course, if one's backend is Scaleway, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, or CoLos then even AWS Lightsail would be ridiculously expensive, but that's not what the thread is about.

I can’t upvote this enough!