Does Galaxy support apex/naked domains? (http://mydomain.com)

I really hate seeing www in front of a website. I just signed up for Galaxy and mLab and so far everything has been great, except it would appear an ugly www is being forced upon my app. :cry:

Would an A Record directed at 52.200.234.87 (galaxy-ingress.meteor.com) work?

EDIT:

Ok, it looks like if I want an apex domain (aka naked domain), Iā€™ll have to use a service that provides ALIAS. The Meteor Guide recommends dnsimple.

So far this is what Iā€™ve got:

  • Galaxy for basic app hosting

  • mLab for database hosting

  • AWS for serving up images

  • MailGun for delivering emails

  • dnsimple for apex domain

Am I covered now?

Iā€™m running https://touchmail.io on the exact same stack (minus AWS) and itā€™s been great for us. I can highly recommend DNSimple.

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Very nice design. What do you use for image hosting (if applicable to your app)?

Very nice design.

Thanks!

The meteor app doesnā€™t have any images so no need for external hosting. Actually, you reminded me. We recently moved the marketing site to Zeitā€™s Now hosting and bumped the app onto an app subdomain. Marketing site images are simply hosted from Now.

If I was doing external image hosting Iā€™d do it with S3 / CloudFront.

Iā€™m guessing that using the naked domain is a strategic decision? If not, Iā€™d strongly recommend checking out http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/.

Note that if you want naked domain redirection on galaxy, there isnā€™t a great solution at the moment. We are currently using http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect

Interesting read. I had no idea not using www could lead to headaches down the line. Iā€™ll have to reconsider my stance on this.

It may be silly but I simply donā€™t like the aesthetic look of www

https://www.domain.com
https://domain.com

However, if it will make things easier on my end, Iā€™ll make the compromise. :slight_smile:

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I have everything working through an ALIAS record. Should I switch back to www or am I safe using an ALIAS?

// ******************* EDIT ******************* //

TL;DR: Using an ALIAS is perfectly fine and wonā€™t lead to any issues down the line.

I found this helpful. Emphasis added by me.

What about ALIAS (or ANAME) records? ā€“ Augustin Riedinger Feb 27 '14 at 11:08

@AugustinRiedinger Those arenā€™t actually a DNS record type - theyā€™re a configuration where certain DNS providers will handle the abstraction of dynamically checking the current A record of the target, then serving it back in response to a query for that name. Theyā€™re essentially designed to solve this exact problem, so theyā€™re definitely appropriate to use for this case. ā€“ Shane Madden Feb 27 '14 at 17:31

So if we use them, the scalability warning from heroku doesnā€™t remain true anymore, right? Or is there any technical drawback into using them? ā€“ Augustin Riedinger Feb 27 '14 at 20:19

@AugustinRiedinger Correct. The technical drawback is in the implementation difficulty, as a ā€œstandardā€ DNS server cannot accomplish that kind of thing without customization. As long as your providerā€™s implementation is stable, it should be just as good as a CNAME setup on a subdomain. ā€“ Shane Madden Feb 28 '14 at 2:44

For anyone reading this thread, I highly recommend using DNSimple for this. They made Apex usage a non-issue.

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