[agraddy]

Just saw this response. In my comment above, I didn't want to spend a lot of time responding to the original post so I handwaved a lot with this "assuming you've set the CNAME and network up for that functionality"

When you have a www you ultimately have more flexibility. For example, you can point a CNAME at another CNAME. This answer on ServerFault mentions the additional options (and downsides of doing that): https://serverfault.com/a/223634 https://serverfault.com/questions/223560/www-a-record-vs-cna...

Heroku vaguely mentions the benefits under the "Limitations" section of this link: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains

After a DDos attack, they were much more explicit in their recommendations: "We strongly recommend against using root domains. Use a subdomain that can be CNAME aliased to proxy.heroku.com, and avoid ever manually entering IPs into your DNS configuration." https://web.archive.org/web/20110609095616/https://status.he...

Here is an old post about someone who initially used an apex domain and then had issues (that they hacked around): https://web.archive.org/web/20110718170757/http://blog.y3xz....

I believe that some larger providers are providing some work arounds which makes it easier to hack around the issue these days, but I still firmly believe that if you set your site up using "www" (even if it is initially an A record - most of mine are A records right now), you will have more flexibility in the long run than if you set your site up on an apex domain.