brandur.org

Naked DNS

A recent link from HN re-raised the discussion about whether it’s a good idea to use “naked DNS”, which means hosting a site at a root domain like “brandur.org” without a “www” subdomain in front of it. The case against it is that because DNS technically only supports A records at the root level, and A records can only be linked to an IP address (and not a hostname like CNAME can), it’s not possible to route traffic with as much flexibility as you might by using a subdomain. If you’re under heavy load or a large scale attack, you can’t dynamically re-route traffic because they’re married to one IP.

This argument was stronger five years ago. Since then, DNS providers have been inevitably moving in the direction of providing non-standard options for root domains that compensate for the downsides of the A record. For example:

Using any of these will neutralize this argument against using a naked domain 1. The disapora of options is unfortunate, but because DNS didn’t provide an adequate answer and because the demand existed, service providers adapted by building their own.

1 Although A records tend to be the champion argument against naked DNS, there are other somewhat compelling points. Maybe the most effective being that you have the overhead of sending cookies (which are set on the main domain) to any subdomains that are serving static assets. This can be alternatively solved by just serving static assets from a separate domain, which is likely to a fairly nominal additional cost if cookie size on static assets is important to you.

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