Why is it that some hosts/domain names need the www. when typing an address in a browser to get to the site?

What is the technical reason for this?
All of the hosts I have been with have never required the WWW. which in my opinion is a pain in the ass!

Many BIG sites require the WWW.!

Out of habit, I type in just the domain name, then ctrl-enter, IE puts all the other required bits in.


Lats...

That is a DNS issue. It depends on how the DNS is setup for with or without the 'www' to work..

laterz..

Is it, though? I use IE on my computer (at school) and if I merely type in the name.xxx, I can't access the page. I have to type in http://name.xxx or www.name.xxx. But in NS or other browsers on the same computer, name.xxx works perfectly fine. Then at home, on my dad's computer, I type in name.xxx and it works fine for the exact same domain. Maybe my IE's just crappy. :D

It is primarily a DNS issue.

When the administrator registers domain.com with the server's domain name service (DNS), he or she can register any name to point to a particular domain's web site. Typically, it's www.domain.com. But it is very easy to have domain.com or any other name point to the web site, too. Most hosts will go ahead and make domain.com and www.domain.com point to the domain's web site, but for whatever reason, some don't do this.

(As a side note, Burlee, my former host, still charges $24.95 to register the "non-www" version of your domain, plus an additional $2.00/month.)

That said, later versions of IE and Netscape will do an "autocomplete" function for you if you enter an incomplete web address. For instance, if you enter "yahoo.com", your browser will add the "http://www." I'm not 100% clear on the tech specs for how the autocomplete task is carried out, but I can see how variations in the process might create problems there, too.

Originally posted by bigmattyh
It is primarily a DNS issue.

That said, later versions of IE and Netscape will do an "autocomplete" function for you if you enter an incomplete web address. For instance, if you enter "yahoo.com", your browser will add the "http://www."

Actually I don't believe that's true. Later versions of IE/NS simply add "http://" to the domain name you've typed, not "http://www". Some sites do an internal redirect from non "www" to "www" version of their address, such as Yahoo.com, which is why typing yahoo.com takes you to www.yahoo.com.

Heck, I thought it was just that people were too lazy or didn't know how to add an A Record to their zone.

www IN A <IP Address>

Later versions of IE/NS simply add "http://" to the domain name you've typed, not "http://www".That's right. My mistake.

Heck, I thought it was just that people were too lazy or didn't know how to add an A Record to their zone.No kidding. I can't imagine why any competent sysadmin wouldn't have the awareness to do this, every time.

I agree with the technical aspects however, ctrl-enter after the domain name works everytime ;)


Lats...

Personally, I think since you are trying to get to a host and not a domain, you should be typing in a hostname too. And since most web servers are named www, or aliased to www, you should be typing it in.

Perhaps I didn't explain myself well - if I want to go to www.yahoo.com in IE, and I don't have it bookmarked, I simply click in the address field, type yahoo and then press ctrl-enter.

IE does the rest with the http://www.yahoo.com

Bit of a bummer though if you want a .net address :)


Lats...

Hey thats a cool trick lats, thanks for the tip.

Did I mention im lazy ? :D

Nothing wrong in being lazy when surfin' :)


Lats...

I agree that big sites should have this sorted out but what if a company had somedomain.com pointing to a machine doing lots of non-web things before they had a web site and it wasn't practical to use the same machine as a web server. That would make it difficult for them to use somedomain.com for the web.

You guys dont like www url becaue our neighbors are calling it habitually without knowing exactly what it is? Some people give me email user.www@yahoo.com , www.user@yahoo.com , user@www.yahoo.com , which is really annoying. So we think we should differentiate ourself from those idiots by calling non-www url right ?

A www reason arises from the proxy servers out there that is designed to keep content in url without looking to the content itself. Most webdesigners link images in their webpage using relative path like <img src="pic.gif">. when a guy call http://www.url.com the image's url become http://www.url.com/pic.gif will be kept in his local ISP's proxy. next time another guy from the same ISP call http://url.com , the image's url become http://url.com/pic.gif , which means that the same image must be pulled call from the remote webserver again instead of using local proxy cache. This lead to double lost of bandwidth.

i'm considering to reconfig my webserver so that all non-www request will be redirected to www url. which result to the reducton of bandwidth cost (same url for all request). But yet afraid that some users who dont like www will yell at me. How do you guys weight between bandwdith cost or coolness of using non-www url ?

Originally posted by jakis
i'm considering to reconfig my webserver so that all non-www request will be redirected to www url. which result to the reducton of bandwidth cost (same url for all request). But yet afraid that some users who dont like www will yell at me. How do you guys weight between bandwdith cost or coolness of using non-www url ?

I don't think you'll see a significant decrease in bandwidth by doing this. You'll probably end up with a lot of angry customers though :( I would recommend installing mod_gzip (assuming you are running apache) if you want to decease your data transfer.

Originally posted by bigmattyh
No kidding. I can't imagine why any competent sysadmin wouldn't have the awareness to do this, every time. Some, no doubt, do have the awareness but purporsely set things up in the way everyone's complaining about here. And there's at least one good reason not to allow access to your website both with and without the "www." -- search engine positioning.

If you allow it, you're likely to end up with some people linking to you as www.example.com, and others as simply example.com. When a spider crawls those links, some search engines won't correctly recognize that it's the same site; instead they might log it as two different sites and further conclude that one is a mirror of the other. Google, most notably, has done this recently.

In general, search engines don't like mirrors. If you're lucky, they won't find the similarity (assuming you've already had "both sites" get into the database). If you are not quite so lucky, they might de-list one of the "sites." In Google's case, that usually was the domain that showed the lower PageRank... but not always, reportedly.

If you're unlucky, they'll remove the "site" which is linked to the most by other peoples' sites.

The site operators who are being branded here as lazy or incompetant -- including those running such major sites as www.adobe.com, for example -- might actually be knowledgeable and prudent.