Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig fw.liquidweb.com. NS
Answer
fw.liquidweb.com. 2 NS ns1.liquidweb.com.
fw.liquidweb.com. 2 NS ns.liquidweb.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0