Certbot certonly "Unable to find a Route53 hosted zone for _acme-challenge"

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: brightonkarate.com

I ran this command: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=correctone AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=correctone certbot certonly --dns-route53 --agree-tos --email myuser@myemail.com -d brightonkarate.com

It produced this output:
Encountered exception during recovery: certbot.errors.PluginError: Unable to find a Route53 hosted zone for _acme-challenge.brightonkarate.com
Unable to find a Route53 hosted zone for _acme-challenge.brightonkarate.com

My web server is (include version): N/A

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: AWS/Route53

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know): yes

I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): certbot 2.11.0

Your domain brightonkarate.com is using these nameservers (not AWS route53):

forsale.hugedomainsdns.com
domain-for-sale.hugedomainsdns.com

Which in turn point to cloudflare DNS.

3 Likes

"for sale" sounds like the domain name isn't registered?

1 Like
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-07-02T18:06:05Z
2 Likes

Yes, I mean, sounds like some domain broker currently has ownership of the domain.

1 Like

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