Apex domains

# Apex routing at fortrabbit

Direct routing of apex domains to environments is not supported at fortrabbit. You can ese a www domain, the www forwarding service will redirect all requests.

# No CNAME for apex domains

Although not impossible, apex domains should really not be routed using a CNAME record. Use an A-Record instead. This is because of DNS specs. Receiving e-mails like info@fortrabbit.com would not be possible when DNS entries have CNAME record at the same time. Modern DNS providers support ANAME/ALIAS records for this.

# No direct A-record routing here

A host name is more flexible than an IP. Any domain routed to an IP is bound to that IP. This doesn't give us the flexibility to move environments around, in case of scaling or incidents, for example with a DDoS attack.

# Our opinion on apex domains

Some think that the minimal look of an apex domain is aesthetically more pleasing than their subdomain counterparts. But as described above, apex domains don't play well with flexible host name routing. Big players like Google use a www. subdomain without you noticing, and most bigger sites do the same. Safari and Chrome don't show the www. prefix in the address bar anymore. Firefox greys out the protocol of this trivial domain. The www. prefix is so common, you hardly recognize it. Some people think, moving from bare to www. will impact SEO negatively. This should not be the case if done properly, as long as the apex domain will forward all requests.