So, I believe it turns out that you can cheat and just define a non-www name as a CNAME to another non-www name. And that mostly works, kind of, maybe, even tho

So, I believe it turns out that you can cheat and just define a non-www name as a CNAME to another non-www name. And that mostly works, kind of, maybe, even though it's a violation of the standards. Except that it'll break under some conditions, but maybe you won't care too much. Or something. Bleargh. Frankly I've forgotten the headsplitting details of trying to finesse the DNS RFCs. What I do remember is that my company, which does cloud hosting on behalf of many customers, looked into this and determined that for now we should do as you suggest and actually follow the spec: Either point your A record directly at your webserver (or its reverse proxy) or use the www. subdomain as a CNAME. I was left with much sympathy for the folks who designed the standard www. subdomain in the first place: They did what they had to do to work sensibly within the DNS system without having to redesign entire corporate domains around the needs of the web server.