I've just signed up with a webhost (which I prefer not to name) and I'm reasonably happy with it. The only nit was when I was ready to put a site online and I asked the support line to what name I should point my 'www' CNAME to. They responded that they don't do that and I need to set my domain's NS records for the hosting to work.

"Why would you ever want to do it that way? Our service to you includes DNS and our servers are probably much better than the one your registrar provides."

This was a bit of surprise as all of the other webhosts I've worked with happily support this. I've set up (eg) gallery.myfriend.example for friends by having them configure their DNS to CNAME 'gallery' to the name of a shared server at a webhost and the webhost does name-based hosting for 'gallery.myfriend.example'.

(Of course, if the webhost ever tells me I'm being moved from A.webhost.example to B.webhost.example, it would be my responsibility to change where the CNAME points. Really good webhosts would instead create myname.webhost.example for the IP of whichever server my stuff happens to be on, so I'd never have to worry about keeping my CNAME up to date.)

Is my impression correct, that most webhosts will happily support a service that begins with a CNAME hosted elsewhere, or is it really more common that webhosts will only provide a service if they control the DNS service too?