How does the registrar (Namecheap) let me set up a CNAME record on the apex domain

amazon s3cname-recorddomain-name-systemnamecheapnameserver

Namecheap seems to let me create a CNAME record on the apex domain, which I thought was contrary to the definition of a CNAME record:

enter image description here

It works (correctly loading up my static site from S3).

Weirdly (and I'm not sure if it's related), there seem to be no name servers registered for this domain: http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=thereitwas.com&timestamp=1413775781&view=1

Is it just repeatedly looking up the IP address of the target of the record and making an A record to that IP? If so, unless this check is frequent I should probably set it up properly to avoid downtime if my S3 bucket ever changes IP.

Apart from this, is there anything wrong with whatever it may be doing?

Best Answer

There are some services that offer a special functionality of aliasing in the sense of "we'll publish an regular record (probably A/AAAA in your case) that we regularly look up from a name behind the scenes" that can be used in this kind of situation instead of a CNAME record.

This is not that kind of service, in this case it appears that they are just violating standards by publishing a CNAME record at the zone apex.

This leads to a situation where you have a conflicting set of records at the zone apex.

You have a CNAME record, claiming that this entire name is an alias of whatever name you specified but then you also have some other records (which isn't possible), such as a SOA record. (NS records also appear to be missing, which seems problematic in itself.)

I would say that all bets are off, it's probably largely implementation dependent what will happen to work and what will break but if your goal includes having a reliably available service this is not a good approach.

Related Topic