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I have a Google Site to which I want to point my domain, hosted by a third party. It was (relatively) easy to establish a CNAME for the www subdomain, but I haven't been able to point my root domain to the Google site using the DNS zones.

So this works for the subdomain:

www 14400 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

For the root, tech support at my host has suggested

mydomain.example. 14400 IN CNAME www.mydomain.example.

but it doesn't seem to work either.

I have seen suggestions to use the solution provided http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect:

point your naked domain A-record to the IP address 174.129.25.170. And it will start to work as soon as your DNS updates.

But that seems iffy to me. Are there security concerns connected with using it?

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If your provider really did recommend you point mydomain.example to another domain using a CNAME you should change providers as they are not competent. This can not work, and is a breach of RFC2181 section 10.1.

A LONG time ago I actually made my own service similar to the one you are talking about in wwwizer.com (in fact it is still working) - unfortunately it is no longer a reasonable solution because it does not work with HTTPS.

Indeed there is no really good solution to pointing your domain's IP to another domain (I'm talking about your domain, not a subdomain of it - for which CNAMES are an OK solution).

There are a few partial attempts at solving this problem - some DNS providers provide a flattening service and create a virtual record type called an "alias" or "aname" record. This is not a true DNS record type and requires the provider to convert your ALIAS record into an A record. Most often you can only use an ALIAS or ANAME record if both the domain name you want to use and the destination are hosted by the same provider. (This is true of Microsofts implementation and Googles implementation)

There are other record types and DNS schema that have been proposed to address this issue, but they are not in common use, so are not a practical solution in the general case.

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    Thanks for this. Long story short: the provider can't do what I want, that is, get from my apex domain to the Google-hosted site. (The CNAME pointing to the Google Site from my www subdomain does work, though). In case this can be of use to someone else, I'm currently looking at freedirector.io and redirect.pizza to do a URL redirect for the 60 days until I can change the registrar (I've just recently registered the domain).
    – Perry
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 11:33
  • Can't you simply reproduce the required A records for the apex of your domain?
    – davidgo
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 12:35
  • Google Sites doesn't provide an IP address, which an A record would require, only their domain to point to in a CNAME. Finally, I'm using freedirect.io. They use Amazon Web Services to provide their redirection service, using an AWS IP that an A record in my DNS points to. Anyway, meanweill.com (http or https) eventually gets to the Google domain using a CNAME for the www subdomain with this solution. All roads now lead to meanweill.com!
    – Perry
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 11:37
  • meanweill.com just hangs. This is not surprising as the IP address associated with it (18.133.72.105) is not answering HTTPS requests (ie no tcp service is running on port 443).
    – davidgo
    Commented May 27, 2023 at 2:37
  • Thanks for taking a look! Yes, the registrar only provides http, not https, by defaut. for me. (When I typed in the domain in my previous comment, this page added the https:// prefix.) Sigh... at least the redirects from the http addresses work, and the www subdomain redirect works on both http and https. After my 60-day waiting period, I'll move it to where everything will work.
    – Perry
    Commented May 28, 2023 at 13:23

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