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Thread: use www or not? rule of thumb
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12-09-2013, 07:33 PM #26Web Hosting Master
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www.yourdomain.com all the way. Without it, it seems unprofessional or trying to be "quirky" I guess.
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12-09-2013, 07:35 PM #27Web Hosting Master
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12-09-2013, 08:07 PM #28Newbie
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Maybe I'm dense because I'm not getting where it comes into play except on a business card or advertising. Whether I type in www.blah.com or blah.com, (not really my website, just what came to mind as an example), my website comes up. Are you talking about coding a website to make it show up as www. or without www. based on your preference no matter what someone types into the address bar? I'm new to developing and coding anything, so sorry if my question sounds silly.
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12-10-2013, 09:48 AM #29Web Hosting Master
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It doesn't matter which format (mydomain.com, www.mydomain.com, http://mydomain.com...) you use in a web browser these days, it will usually guess what you want and get you there. But strictly speaking, the browser is assuming that you probably don't want an FTP connection or an https connection or a domain (with or without prefix) that doesn't exist.
Where it does make a difference is when you type the address into an email or word document, or when you want to remember it easily. Also you need to be consistent for the search engines.
To be precise, you should ideally specify the protocol and a fully qualified domain (as the original browsers insisted), otherwise you risk being taken to the wrong site - perhaps a phishing one.Phil McKerracherI do server maintenance and troubleshooting
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12-10-2013, 02:15 PM #30Aspiring Evangelist
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By "balanced", are you referring to poor man's load balancing? (example.com and www.example.com are on two different servers?) If not, I'm not sure I follow the point you're trying to make.
Let's look at it this way, when was the last time that anyone on WHT bothered to type "www." before a domain? Some of it might depend on how technical of an audience you're targeting, but from a technical standpoint, there's no use for www these days, as it's not a scheme. (Meaning if the full URI was www://example.com, then I would feel differently.)
Also, I wouldn't want potential clients to think I'm going to charge 90's pricing just because of URI in their address bar...
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12-11-2013, 04:53 PM #31Newbie
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Use www. That's how a user will see your site in searches and that's how they would recommend it to someone as well. www has been finely ingrained into peoples minds since the beginning, I doubt it will ever change.
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12-11-2013, 05:28 PM #32Junior Guru Wannabe
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I agree with the general consensus, I use www however I do believe its personal preference, as long as you redirect your non www to the www version so you don't get duplicate content issues in SE rankings.
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12-19-2013, 01:16 PM #33Newbie
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As far as Google is concerned I don't think it really matters in terms of SEO. Although I think most people still instinctely type in www before a domain nowadays so it might be better to go that way. But as long as their is a 301 in place it should not really matter for people finding your site. In terms of how people link to you they might use the www version more, so it would make more sense to use the www so all your incoming links don't have to pass through the 301 redirect.
Hope that makes sense..██ GeneratePress ~ The Best WordPress Theme I Have Ever Used
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12-19-2013, 01:39 PM #34Web Hosting Evangelist
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Thanks for the topic! I wanted to put a redirect (non-www to www) for quite a time, but was putting it off (laziness). Now I did it.
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12-20-2013, 10:02 AM #35Web Hosting Master
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned cookies. If you use domain.com, any cookies set on your website affect every single subdomain. Even if bob.domain.com is a completely different website, the domain.com cookies will still be active. In cookie land, domain.com is effectively *.domain.com.
At the very least this isn't optimal for integrity and security, but it also has performance implications. If you have cookies set on a certain hostmask, that cookie is transmitted with every single request you make to the server — even images.
That's why a lot of websites split their static assets such as CSS and images onto a subdomain even if they're not using a CDN. If your website is on www.domain.com, your cookies will only affect requests to that hostmask; if you use static.domain.com for assets, no cookies will be transmitted when loading them.
Another thing worth mentioning here is that Varnish is generally set (for good reason) to never cache files that have cookies attached to the same hostmask. That includes all your static files you probably want Varnish to cache, so if you want Varnish to be able to cache your assets you need to either not use cookies on your site or shift the assets to another subdomain — and of course, not host your site at domain.com.
Varnish can be set up to work around this and ignore cookies for certain types of files — but has it been? You'd be surprised what you can discover by taking a peek at your files' HTTP headers.Last edited by Ryan Williams; 12-20-2013 at 10:08 AM.
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12-20-2013, 10:59 AM #36Web Hosting Master
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That is a very good point. You might want cookies to be shared if you use subdomains as a sort of shortcut (like webmail.mydomain.com) but most of the time you won't.
Another "gotcha" can happen if you set up a redirect to the www URL and find you have accidentally disabled all such "convenience" subdomains, or have disabled https access, or disabled access by IP address. And if you do it with a 301 redirect, it can be hard to undo any mistakes because a "permanent" redirect gets cached in user browsers outside your control.Phil McKerracherI do server maintenance and troubleshooting
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12-20-2013, 11:22 AM #37Junior Guru
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We use WWW.
Partly because I'm old school and prefer it.
Secondly because we use subdomains quite a bit for different services (Though, only 2 are current public..) but it helps differentiate between them. So http://domain.free is redirected to http://www.domain.free via 301.
That and I don't want cross contamination cookies.Last edited by JakeMS; 12-20-2013 at 11:26 AM.
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12-21-2013, 02:53 AM #38
Ditch the WWW, it looks cleaner since there's less text. When I think of WWW, I think of late 90s to early 2000s.
When going to a website, I don't remember the last time I've typed WWW in before the name. Probably going on 5+ years now.
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12-21-2013, 09:27 AM #39New Member
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use www or not? rule of thumb
In the dim and distant days at the dawn of the web, those publishing a URL on offline media would add the ‘www’ prefix. It informed everyone you’d moved into the twenty-first century and owned a piece of prime real estate on the World Wide Web.
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12-21-2013, 10:09 AM #40Web Hosting Master
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You may be right and maybe the www will eventually disappear. I wouldn't be surprised.
The problem with leaving off the www is it's not always obvious that you're talking about a web site. Especially now that not every address ends in ".com". To make it clear, you have to add http:// which is worse, IMHO.
It's a bit like not bothering to type a currency symbol in front of prices in dollars, because it's obvious from the context that you're talking about a price and the US dollar is the only currency that matters. But it's a dangerous assumption until it becomes so common that exceptions have to be explicitly pointed out.Phil McKerracherI do server maintenance and troubleshooting
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12-29-2013, 10:51 AM #41WHT Addict
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I'm not sure "Rule of thumb" is the right way to go about it.
As it's all down to preference - as long as you redirect the un-used prefix to the other one.
I went for www. just because of its popularity, but i can see the argument for both.
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01-12-2014, 07:13 AM #42New Member
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I would use www because many CDNs (content delivery networks) work only on www version.
Examples:
1) Google page speed service is only for www
2) Cloudflare CDN
It's important that you choose only 1 to prevent duplicate content issue for SEO and overall user experience
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01-12-2014, 08:11 AM #43Hello World
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01-13-2014, 03:35 PM #44Web Hosting Master
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01-21-2014, 05:35 AM #45Aspiring Evangelist
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www. and non-www does not different, choose the one you like and use it for all along with your website. Do not use both as this will be caused duplicate content issue. Google tend to index only 1 version ofr your site either www. or non-www version
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01-23-2014, 05:59 AM #46Web Hosting Guru
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01-23-2014, 10:27 PM #47Web Hosting Master
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I don't see why anyone would use www.
I HATE when you go to a website and domain.com doesn't work, but only www.domain.com does.
It should be:
A record for domain.com -> server IP
A record for *.domain.com (wildcard) -> server IPSome useful tutorials for VPSes...
Set up an unmanaged Linux VPS to host websites (avoid having to pay for cPanel)
Install a GUI on a Linux VPS with RDP (cheap alternative to paying for a Windows license if you need a basic remote workstation)
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01-23-2014, 10:46 PM #48Web Host Reviewer
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