No doubt there's ways around any problem with a naked domain, but why work so hard on something so trivial? No user has ever turned away from a website because it hadd "www." in front. That said, your naked domain surely needs to redirect to your "www." address if you set it up this way.
It's not hard work to skip the "www" these days. DNS providers like Cloudflare support CNAME-like functionality on the apex domain, and if you're using AWS then Route 53 provides special "alias" records which let you hook the zone apex on to an ELB, for example. I'm sure other providers have similar functionality.
As for why, well, personally I prefer the look of a domain without the "www". It looks cleaner to me.
Those are fair enough reasons. I see being tied (permanently) to a provider like Cloudflare or AWS as a problem. I'd rather use the www and be allowed to move to providers that don't necessarily offer the same features, or to my own infrastructure where that is or is not an option.
Let's agree that for the most part it's a bad idea to change from www to naked or the other way around after the launch of a website (for seo reasons). So you have to pick one at launch and try to stick with it. Why choose the option that looks nicer but has problems associated with it and potential vendors not supporting it, vs the one that arguably looks messy but that all users everywhere are well accustomed to and has none of the configuration issues that affect naked domains?
There's postmortems out there about using naked domains and DDoS attacks. There's issues with load balancing, with domain configuration, with cookies.
If your website gets overrun by HNers, what's your plan to compensate quickly? How much of your plan is bogged down by the fact that you're on a naked domain?
