'Naked' domains on App Engine
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under naked-domains, app-engine, tech, dns
One topic that comes up frequently on the App Engine groups is that of 'naked' domains in App Engine, and how to handle them. A naked domain, for the uninitiated, is one without a service-specific subdomain. For example, "google.com" is naked, while "www.google.com" is not. This post provides an overview of why naked domains are a problem, and what you can do about them.
There are two separate factors that combine to make handling of naked domains a problem in App Engine. The first is the design of DNS, the system for resolving domain names to IP addresses. There are two different types of DNS record we're concerned about here: A records, which specify the IP address for a name, and CNAME records, which acts a "see also", specifying another name for a domain. For example, an A record might say "google.com has the IP 216.239.59.104", while a CNAME record might say "google.com is also known as www.l.google.com".
The problem arises with the way CNAME records work. An A record specifies the IP address only for a single record - for example, an A record on google.com specifies ...