
Subdomain Me - add www with an A record - bradleyjoyce
http://www.subdomain.me/
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achew22
It is really not a good idea to let your naked record go to a 3rd party. If
you need your root to be an A name, go with a DNS provider that will do URL
redirects. If you trust them with DNS resolution of your domain you can trust
them to not go crazy with your root record.

EDIT: If you are looking for a host that will do this, <http://NameCheap.com>
is how I do it but I understand GoDaddy and Hover does it too. Seriously... go
with a reputable registrar that has these simple features it will pay off in
the end.

~~~
bradleyjoyce
when I saw someone retweet about this service in my stream it was a bit
confusing... can't really see the purpose myself, when you, as you mention,
you can handle this within the confines of your own registrar.

I'm curious as to why the developer felt the need to make this.

~~~
awormus
I wrote this "service" and the answer to why I did it is three-fold. 1. I had
used 2 services, blogger and shopify, which didn't support pointing naked
domain names. 2. It took all of 10 minutes and 3. I somehow landed on an epic
domain name.

The long answer is that I run a platform for high-availability sites. I don't
want to manage the client's DNS and I want to have the flexibility to
instantly move sites from server to server. The answer, is to setup a CNAME
and have the clients point their primary CNAME (www) to a host where you
control the DNS.

www.example.com CNAME to example.myhostingservice.com.
example.myhostingservice.com would then either point to an IP address or a
round-robin DNS setup.

That leaves the problem of the naked domain. Traditionally you'd point the
naked domain to the Primary IP address and then do some httpd.conf magic to
redirect the naked to the www (or vice versa). However this does not solve the
problem of what happens if the underlying IP address changes.

Pointing the naked domain to a dedicated IP address which is not associated
with where the site is hosted removes the problem of what would happen if you
change IPs quickly.

~~~
bradleyjoyce
Interesting, thanks for the response!

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falseflags
This is pretty much the greatest setup for a mass-lemonpartying known to man.

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jamuraa
That's weird, I usually go the other way - I redirect the www to the naked
domain.

~~~
storborg
I may be wrong here, but I think there's one good reason to use
anything.example.com instead of example.com: with the naked domain, you can't
have a separate domain for static assets which the client doesn't send the
cookie to (for performance improvement). If you set a cookie with the domain
example.com, it will still get sent to static.example.com.

Granted, you could use examplecdn.com or something, but then you have to
register and manage more domains.

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apgwoz
Isn't that what the domain portion of the set-cookie header is for?

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seabee
It gets propagated to subdomains, it doesn't restrict it to just the domain
specified.

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apgwoz
Yes, it gets propogated to subdomains, but the point was that if you have
subdomain X.y.z, as long as you set the cookie for y.z, the cookie is valid
for X.y.z and U.y.z.

~~~
storborg
My point was that you _don't_ want the cookie to be sent to other subdomains,
so you'd actually want to set the domain to X.y.z. You can't do that if you're
web domain is y.z.

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twir
Forgive my ignorance, but when is this useful?

Don't most self-respecting DNS providers allow you to do this?

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vinhboy
If you have Godaddy, they allow you to forward your domain to www for free. I
do that with my GAE apps.

~~~
amoore
Thanks, I didn't realize that. I've been using godaddy for eons and have
looked for this feature on their confusing site before. I'll look again.

~~~
Lewisham
Let me know when you find out how to do it. I have my www. subdomain pointing
to Google Sites, and I'd love for the naked domain to go there too.

~~~
vinhboy
Seriously? you guys can't find it?

Here it is: <http://imagesk.com/QnEp4RU8.png>

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bugsy
What the website advocates, redirecting site traffic through them, is a very
bad idea. If you don't know why this might be so, stop and ask yourself why
you are in charge of modifying the zone records.

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makethetick
It's a pretty clever idea, I've come across loads of sites that have a naked
domain but no www.

As clever as it is though, it serves no real world purpose, anyone clever
enough to setup up their own domain will be able to set up a www subdomain, be
it dns level or using a 301 redirect.

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gcr
I go with enom. They allow wildcard subdomains, so I just ask nginx to
301-redirect the .www to the root

    
    
      server {
        listen       80 default;
        server_name  your_domain.net;
        rewrite   ^  http://www.your_domain.net$request_uri? permanent;
      }

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Fileformat
I did this too (redirect2www.com/74.53.18.72). So easy I'm surprised no one at
Google/etc has done it with a slick IP address like they did for DNS.

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upinsmoke
Works with Google App Engine?

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TomasSedovic
Yes. This works on the DNS level, so it doesn't matter what technology your
site uses.

But as others pointed out, decent DNS registrars will let you do this in your
DNS administration account. Which is much safer.

