How do I host a website? I'm having such a difficult time finding accurate resources.

Question

I own a domain name, and I have been trying to use route 53 to provide dns for it and deliver the content I create and upload on a website that I'd like to host on aws. 
I have been using a  number of tutorials and reading documentation, but nothing that I've found seems to be up to date, is inaccurate or just plain confusing. 
First obstacle is getting DNS to work, I changed the DNS records on the registrar site to reflect the route 53 name servers, but its still not propagated..I assume I've done something wrong. I created hosted zones and buckets for the domain a www.example.com and a example.com as well as an index and error document and waited for the dns changes to propagate but after 3 days still nothing. What I hope to accomplish (the goal) is basically a website that will afford me a secure interface to upload the cartoons that I make and then require users to register for a free account to view them. I am very poor so I am having to do this all on my own. The template based solutions from the registrar we're in adequate and entirely too much for templates that didn't even do what I wanted them to do...
I'm not adverse to incurring some monthly expense to deliver my content, assuming that I can somehow monetize my traffic without deterring from the sites functionality...I just want people to be able to visit my site and be entertained by my cartoons...I need to be able to focus on writing and producing content not plagued with babysitting a patched together system...I have used CM systems like drupal and wordpress in the past but I'd like for any user to be able to stream the content to any device...it's been a long time since I have done anything like this so I'm really feeling dumb and frustrated any advice and assistance that anyone can offer would be apprecaiated.

Answer

It sounds like the heart of your problem is with the third-party registrar, as you have created a public hosted zone in Route 53 and then make a note of the AWS NS records on this zone, and then updated the NS records on the registrar's side. There's nothing that Amazon can do until this propagates through. You can check if the change is visible yet using dig https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/

You mention you've created buckets as well, so I'm guessing you're familiar with https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html

You also mention WordPress - if your domain is (say) mycartoons.com and you want to redirect this to a Wordpress site then you need to:

1. in S3 create a bucket called mycartoons.com, once it's created then go to its properties and enable "static website hosting" and select "redirect requests for an object", and the hostname will be your WordPress site and the protocol will be HTTPS.

2. in the Route 53 hosted zone for mycartoons.com create an A-record for mycartoons.com with a value s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com. (obviously, replace ap-southeast-2 with the region your bucket was created in).

3. still in Route 53, create a CNAME record for www.mycartoons.com with a value mycartoons.com.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com (same comment about the region)

Now you should be able to hit http://mycartoons.com/ & http://www.mycartoons.com/ and it takes you to the WordPress site.

Answer

where is your domain name?

How do I host a website? I'm having such a difficult time finding accurate resources.

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