Zone Apex / Naked Domain / Root Domain CNAME Support for Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Other Cloud Hosts

On May 16, 2011, Matthew Prince announced that CloudFlare now supports CNAME Flattening, a solution to the problem of using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud (EC2) with DNS RFC-compliant support for CNAME at the root. The challenge was that while subdomains could be set as CNAMEs, the root domain or "naked domain" had to be an "A Record." This made it difficult to point a root domain to EC2 without using hacks. CloudFlare's new feature allows users to set their zone apex to a CNAME, enabling them to use naked domains with cloud hosts like EC2, Rackspace's Cloud, and Google App Engine. Additionally, using CloudFlare's free service for a website hosted on EC2 can make the site about 50% faster worldwide while saving around 65% off bandwidth costs.