Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig west-datacenter.net. NS
Answer
west-datacenter.net. 5 NS dns3.westhost.com.
west-datacenter.net. 5 NS dns2.westhost.com.
west-datacenter.net. 5 NS dns1.westhost.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0