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How to Use a Root Domain as a CNAME for UptimeRobot⚓

Summary⚓

I recently bought the status.cc domain to use for my UptimeRobot dashboard. Uptime Robot allows for utilizing a custom domain for the status page instead of their more generic url. As great as this has been for me, I've only ever used it with subdomains.

Having a domain such as status.cc speaks for itself, so having a subdomain like status.status.cc doesn't make any sense. This is problematic, however, because a limitation of UptimeRobot's custom domain service is that it's limited to subdomains.

To work around this, I was able to prefix the domain with www to get around this limitation. This solved the subdomain problem, but would normally require explicitly typing www.status.cc, which is a bit annoying in a modern setting. To get around this, I added a permanent redirect to automatically redirect so that status.cc automatically becomes www.status.cc.

How-To⚓

In order to accomplish this, I needed to do the following:

UptimeRobot⚓

  • Log into UptimeRobot and select Status Pages.
  • In Custom Domain, input www.status.cc.
  • Save the new custom domain.

Cloudflare⚓

  • Log into Cloudflare and navigate to the status.cc domain.
  • Open DNS and add the following two records:
Type Name Content TTL Proxy status
CNAME status.cc www.status.cc Auto Proxied
CNAME www stats.uptimerobot.com Auto Proxied
  • Configure the remaining Cloudflare settings as per usual.

Outcome⚓

At this point, navigating to https://status.cc should automatically redirect to https://www.status.cc, which works around the subdomain requirement by making www the subdomain.

References⚓

Search the page for root domains, which brings up the appropriate result. Should the page ever get removed for any reason, the post text is as follows:

Since CNAME doesn't support root domains, you will have to change the name in Freenom to www. Then, when you're linking the domain on repl.it, type in www.cma-chat.cf. It should work then.