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Comment by rza | Hacker News Reader

I host my personal website GAE. One thing to be aware of is when moving to a personal domain, you need to map to a subdomain so you can't use a naked domain[1] (e.g. 'http://github.com'). You have to map to something like 'www.'

[1] https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/general#naked_dom...

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This is the main reason why I haven't bothered switching to GAE for my static website. AWS + S3 + Route 53 allows hosting naked domains: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/12/27/root-do...

CloudFront allows naked domains, so you can use naked domains for almost anything if you place a layer of CF before it.

For example, for this case of GAE, you can use

  Naked domains <=> CloudFront <=> GAE

DNSimple allows you to use naked domains with cloud services, without using a CNAME.

This isn't really true. You just need to configure a redirect from the naked domain to your serving URL, at www.

For example, my site (justbeamit.com), runs on GAE, but the naked domain simply redirects to the www.

I thought about adding an edit in there to clarify you could do that, but I think the points remain that in the end, you still end up with www. in the URL bar.

The real reason is because you cannot add a CNAME record using the zone apex.

AWS gets away with this afaik with some magic to point to the IP address for the loadbalancer that would serve your content.

Techincally you can find the IP address for your GAE subdomain and add an A record for your apex domain, but keep in mind that this is a bad idea.

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