I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of DNS, preferring to just add my CNAMEs and A records as appropriate, and leave the behind the scenes to other services. I host a few sites on Amazon S3, which clearly doesn't allow you to have an A record with a specific IP as it is a cloud service. Consequently, I have to use 301 redirects for the naked (foobar.org) domain to www.foobar.org, enforcing the use of either a third party service, or a server to do the redirects.
I noticed that Cloudflare have started offering a service which allows you essentially to break DNS conventions and set a CNAME for your root domain – solving the naked domain on S3 issue. However, I'm not sure what the issues are with this – is this going to cause issues for MX records, web visitors and others? What could be the unintended side effects?
Best Answer
It's not really a
CNAME, though, is it? It's a configuration of where they should pull your site from when they get requests for it.CloudFlare's service directs traffic to their own servers as a caching proxy. Their example has a
CNAMEgoing to an Amazon EC2 address, but that's not the server they're going to point you to when your client queries for it; instead, they'll return the address of their own proxy host in response to your query.If they did indeed configure a
CNAMErecord on your root domain, it would indeed break yourMXandSOArecords - but I suspect that's not how they've implemented it.