Comments on: Does your Web site work without WWW?

By: Knut Holt

Knut Holt — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:07:57 +0000

I have never thought about this. I have three domains. I just tried them with and without http://www. Two of them worked with and without. The third, the one I submitted in this post did only work with http://www.

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:22:32 +0000

Aidan

The only thing is that DNS doesn’t handle redirection as powerfully as rewriting does. It’s very crippled
(not that you’d want it to do more …)

Michele

By: Aidan Finn

Aidan Finn — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:13:59 +0000

Thanks for the link @Paul. There are a surprising number of sites around that still don’t set this up properly. And it’s such a basic thing. It’s one of those things that has absolutely no effect on me but still makes me irrationally annoyed every time I encounter it

Re @Michele’s point about some ISPs not providing DNS records for both versions: if any of them are still doing this then it’s very bad form. If that is the case though you can use a 3rd party DNS provider. As @Ana’s linked post describes there are also several other benefits to using a 3rd party DNS service, including being able to do your redirection at the DNS level instead of using a rewrite rule on your server.

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:06:00 +0000

Ana

I think you misunderstood what Aidan was talking about. You need to have an A record, but you would use mod_rewrite or something similar to “push” the user to the URL you are actually using. See the link in my last comment

Michele

By: Ana Nelson

Ana Nelson — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:30:20 +0000

If for some reason you were committed to using a hosting provider who didn’t provide you with a www A record then you can get around this with an independent DNS service, which is a good idea for many other reasons. I’ve just written about that here: http://url.ie/81m

In fact an A record isn’t really what you want since for SEO reasons you don’t want both http://www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com to be indexed by search engines, as Aidan points out in his post.

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:11:47 +0000

Paul

I had a “run in” with someone on the EI list about this a few months ago. While they had the DNS setup to handle both variations the plain domain.tld didn’t point anywhere useful, so they were probably losing business and causing confusion as a result.

Of course from an SEO perspective it works a lot better to 301 the second record to the first

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:07:17 +0000

@Michele I guess the advice to any Web master, is to ensure their Web sites work with and without http://WWW. This point wasn’t even raised during the W3C Advisory Committee debate.

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:04:19 +0000

Paul - Why would I joke about it ?
I can’t think of any examples offhand, as a lot of the sites I’d frequent aren’t hosted by Eircom or Esat anymore.
The reasoning is something related to an RFC on DNS entries - I can’t remember the exact one, though I’m sure someone else might have the reference to hand

Michele

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:57:03 +0000

@Michele - tell me you’re joking? I wasn’t aware of that. Can you name one or two as an example. What’s the reason for it?

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:54:25 +0000

A lot of the ISPs traditionally do not create A records for domain.tld, so it will only work with the “www” part. Supposedly this is due to an old RFC
*sigh*