I have a website on a bucket in Amazon S3, and recently started to get emails from Google "Googlebot can't access your site". When I go to Webmaster Tools and I try to fetch in fact it doesn't work. Also people in locations different from mine sometimes reported they could not access the website. Now for curiosity I tried from my terminal: $ host xxx xxx is an alias for xxx.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. xxx.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com is an alias for s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com has address yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy And when I try with dig: $ dig xxx ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> xxx ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17860 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;xxx. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: xxx. 300 IN CNAME xxx.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. xxx.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. 60 IN CNAME s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com. 60 IN A yyy ;; Query time: 1514 msec ;; SERVER: 75.75.75.75#53(75.75.75.75) ;; WHEN: Fri Aug 22 12:32:13 2014 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 127 It seems OK to me. Why would Google tell me there is a DNS error? UPDATE: Google also cannot fetch robots.txt, but I can fetch it from my browser. UPDATE 2: I have a forwarding on the root to the www.* hostname: $ dig thenifty.me ; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> thenifty.me ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49286 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;thenifty.me. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: thenifty.me. 300 IN SOA ns1hwy.name.com. support.name.com. 1 10800 3600 604800 300 ;; Query time: 148 msec ;; SERVER: 75.75.75.75#53(75.75.75.75) ;; WHEN: Fri Aug 22 13:32:56 2014 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 88