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www or not: WHY?

  • conorific
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:13 pm

I didn't know where to post this, so moderators, move it if you feel it should be:

Why is it that in order to access some websites, you have to put www before the URL, and in others, it doesn't matter?
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:13 pm

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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:22 pm

It may be with how the apache server is set up, not sure. I don't use www for my site.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:26 pm

Yup, it's because of the way Apache is setup (or the DNS record).

something.com and http://www.something.com are two completely different things.

You could even have the two addresses pointing to two completely different servers.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:26 pm

Because the smart ones make an A record for both with and without. An A record is a DNS entry that makes the typed name resolve to the actual IP address of the site.

In essense what you do is you say yoursite.com = 198.162.0.1 and http://www.yoursite.com = 198.162.0.1 That way no matter how you type the name it resolves to the same place.
"There's no place like 127.0.0.1 except for ::1."
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:31 pm

I think the host I am on resolves *.yourhost.com to the correct place.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:33 pm

That is why I make absolutely certain that any site I create, be it mine or a client's site, is always sitting on a host server where that www. crap doesn't ever have to be typed.

I'm lazy. People are lazy. The less you have to type in the address bar, the better off you are. :D
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:36 pm

I type the www out of shear habbit and I'm pretty sure MS-IIS has A records too.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:39 pm

IIS does have A records.
"There's no place like 127.0.0.1 except for ::1."
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:50 pm

Your best bet is having a script that detects whether your site is on http://www.yoursite.com or just yoursite.com and forwards to http://www.yoursite.com if the URL is simply yoursite.com.

That way, if people want to paste your URLs elsewhere, you know your http://www.yoursite.com URLs are getting the links, and helping your pagerank on your primary hostname.

200 links to http://www.yoursite.com is better than 100 links to http://www.yoursite.com and 100 links to yoursite.com

I don't type www out of habit, Internet Explorer automatically inserts it.

When I come here, I just type ozzu in the Address bar, and hit CTRL+Enter. Then it automatically adds http://www. at the beginning and .com at the end.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 1:59 pm

ha! I go Favorites/Forums/Ozzu Webmaster Forum

*How lame am I?
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Post April 9th, 2004, 2:03 pm

I'm more lame -- I just hit Alt+Home since OZZU is set as my home page
"There's no place like 127.0.0.1 except for ::1."
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Post April 9th, 2004, 2:07 pm

lol... addicted ;)
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Post April 9th, 2004, 5:47 pm

:oops: I must be the laziest one here, I Right-Click/Ozzu :) I setup an IE context option that takes me right to unread posts :P
Did the same thing with Google.
Strong with this one, the sudo is.
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Post April 9th, 2004, 6:06 pm

Sweet!!!
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Post April 9th, 2004, 6:11 pm

digitalMedia wrote:
ha! I go Favorites/Forums/Ozzu Webmaster Forum

*How lame am I?


me too :-P
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Post April 9th, 2004, 6:11 pm

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