TIL: you can’t point a root domain at a hostname with a CNAME, and GoDaddy doesn’t give you the workaround that other providers do.
The problem: I wanted example.com (the apex, no www) to point at a host that hands you a hostname to target, not a fixed IP. The obvious move is a CNAME. But the DNS spec won’t let a CNAME live at the apex, because the apex already has SOA and NS records and a CNAME can’t coexist with anything else on the same name. So the obvious move is illegal at the one place I needed it.
The usual rescue is an ALIAS record (some providers call it ANAME, Cloudflare calls it CNAME flattening): it acts like a CNAME but resolves to an IP behind the scenes, so it’s legal at the apex. GoDaddy’s DNS just… doesn’t offer one. You get A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, the standard set, and no ALIAS/ANAME anywhere in the panel.
That leaves three options: hardcode A records to the host’s current IPs (and hope they never change, which is exactly what a hostname target exists to avoid), forward the apex to www and let www take the CNAME, or move DNS to a provider that supports apex aliasing. I ended up moving DNS, which sounds dramatic and took about ten minutes.
The lesson I’ll keep: when you pick a domain registrar, “can it ALIAS the apex” is a real question, not a detail.
Additional Resources#
- Why can’t I CNAME the apex? (DNS RFC 1034, the SOA/CNAME conflict)
- Cloudflare on CNAME flattening — the apex-alias workaround done well
