Hosting Terms, for Name Holders
With cloud hosting the record moves, not the name
Your developer has asked you to point the domain at a cloud endpoint, and the zone editor will not let you put a CNAME where they want it.
The short answer
Cloud hosting draws capacity from a pool and bills it by consumption, and the consequence for a name holder is that you are usually given a hostname to point at rather than a fixed IP address. That single difference is what makes the bare domain harder to configure than the www version of it.
Nothing about the name itself changes when a workload moves in the cloud. What changes is a record in your zone — which is why the TTL on that record, and where the zone lives, matter more here than anywhere else.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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Instead of one named machine, instances appear and disappear on request, storage and transfer run on a meter, and growing is an API call rather than a hardware move. Addresses are therefore treated as disposable, and platforms hand out names such as my-app.eu-west.provider.net that they can re-point behind your back.
Elasticity carries a price in both senses. A workload that runs at a steady level all month can cost several times more on metered billing than on a flat plan, and a name pointed at a moving target needs a zone whose records you can change quickly.
The apex problem, and the three ways round it
A CNAME cannot coexist with other records at the same name, and the bare domain must carry SOA and NS records, so example.com cannot be a CNAME while www.example.com can. That is not a limitation of your panel; it is the DNS specification, and every provider hits it.
Three real answers. Use whatever your DNS provider calls a flattening record — ALIAS, ANAME or CNAME flattening — which answers with an address while tracking a hostname. Or put an A record with the platform's static address in it, accepting that you must maintain it. Or serve the bare name as a redirect to www and let www carry the CNAME.
TTL is your rollback window
The TTL on a record is how long resolvers are entitled to remember the old answer. Change a record with a day-long TTL and some visitors keep the previous address for the rest of the day, and there is nothing you or your host can do to hurry them.
So the sequence is: lower the TTL to five minutes, wait for the old value to expire, make the change, verify, then raise the TTL again once things have settled. Low TTLs cost a few more queries and buy a rollback measured in minutes.
What the meter counts, and what it does not
Metered billing usually counts outbound transfer, storage and instance hours. DNS queries against your zone are billed separately if at all, and they are not measured in gigabytes — a low TTL raises query volume, not egress, which is why the fear of expensive TTLs is misplaced.
The bill that surprises people is the one for traffic you did not know you were serving: an unoptimised image, a video, a badly behaved crawler. Neither the name nor the DNS provider has anything to do with it.
Keep the name out of the platform
It is tempting to let a cloud platform run DNS for your name as well as the workload, and it does make the initial setup a click shorter. It also means that a billing dispute, an account lockout or a decision to move suppliers becomes a DNS emergency rather than an inconvenience.
Delegation can stay with your registrar or an independent DNS provider while the workload lives anywhere. Then moving supplier is one record change made from a panel the supplier does not control.
Why the bare domain will not take a CNAME
The apex CNAME restriction generates more support tickets than any other single fact about DNS, and it is almost never explained — only worked around. Here it gets a plain statement of the rule and the three legitimate answers to it.
A free SSL certificate comes with every plan and reissues itself before the old one lapses.
- Neighbouring records and registry rules linked together
- Written by the people who answer the transfer tickets
- Locks and grace periods given in days, not folklore
- Panel screens named, so you know where to click
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The apex rule, stated plainly
Why example.com cannot be a CNAME while www.example.com can, and the three legitimate ways round it.
Written from the transfer queue
These are the answers our own desk gives when a name stops resolving on a Friday, not a rewrite of somebody else's help centre.
TTL treated as a rollback plan
Cache lifetimes explained as the window in which a mistake can be undone, with the numbers to use.
The command that settles it
Where a claim can be checked from outside — dig, whois, a resolver you do not control — the check is written out in full.
Authority kept independent
The case for leaving delegation somewhere the platform you are paying does not control.
Clocks stated in days
Locks, grace periods and cache lifetimes are given as numbers you can diarise instead of being left as folklore.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find out what you are being asked to point at
A hostname and an IP address need different record types. Get that one answer from your developer before opening the zone editor.
- 2
Lower the TTL a day ahead
Five minutes on the records you intend to change. Do it the day before, not the moment before, or the old value is still cached when you cut over.
- 3
Verify from outside, then restore the TTL
Check the change from a resolver you do not control, then put the TTL back up once the new answer has held for a day.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- A zone editor in the panel, so the records stay yours to change
- Availability checked live before you pay for anything
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- NVMe storage behind a LiteSpeed cache on every tier, the smallest included
- Softaculous in the panel for one-click installs, WordPress among them
- PHP versions chosen per site from the control panel
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- ImunifyAV+ sweeping every site on the account for malware
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old certificate lapses
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
Why will my zone editor not let me put a CNAME on the bare domain?
Because a CNAME is exclusive: it cannot sit alongside other records for the same name, and the bare domain must carry its own SOA and NS records. Any editor that appears to allow it is either quietly making a flattening record instead or storing something that will break your mail. The legitimate options are a flattening record, a maintained A record, or serving the bare name as a redirect to www.
If the cloud platform changes my instance's address, does my name break?
It does if you pinned an A record to that address and nobody told you. That is the reason platforms hand out hostnames: the hostname is theirs to re-point when the address changes. Point at the hostname wherever the record type allows it, and where it does not — at the apex — use a flattening record so the tracking is done for you.
Can I keep DNS where it is and still host here?
Yes, and it is often the calmer option. Leave delegation with whoever holds it, then point an A record and the www record at the account. Authority stays wherever the NS records at the registry say it is, which also means the panel's own zone editor will have no effect until that changes.
Is a name's renewal price the same as its first year?
For the hosting, yes: it renews at the figure you ordered at. For the name, not necessarily — each registry sets its own renewal rate, and on plenty of extensions the second year costs more than the first. The figure shown against the name at checkout is the one that will be billed, so read it before a cheap first year persuades you.
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