What is the recommended approach for mapping naked hosted domains through DDNS to www?

Question

I am hosting a few domains on "mydomain.com". I have created a CNAME mapping for all subdomains (*) to my DDNS entry "[my_name].ddns.net". These are working great.

I cannot create a CNAME record for the apex and the A name record doesn't work since I can't use the DDNS domain name and my WAN IP changes.

I see others use http://wwwizer.com/ to do a naked redirect to www. It works since wwwizer has a static IP address. Is this really the best solution to what seems like a really common problem?

Thanks a bunch.

Answer 1

You may get some votes to close because most businesses aren't hosting their website from a (presumably) residential internet connection that requires a DDNS provider. And this site is supposed to be geared towards "managing IT systems in a business environment".

However, it is a common enough problem for websites in general that many DNS providers are now offering a feature (with varying names) that is effectively a virtual CNAME record for the apex of your domain. I've seen it most commonly referred to as an ALIAS record or CNAME Flattening.

You give the provider the FQDN of where you would want the CNAME to point and instead of returning a CNAME record to clients, the nameserver resolves the FQDN at query time (or some cached interval) and returns the IP as an A/AAAA record to clients instead.

Using this solution would obviously require your current provider to support such a feature or moving to a provider that does. Keep in mind that your domain registrar and your DNS provider don't have to be the same company.