Comments on: Does your Web site work without WWW?

By: Branson Mo

Branson Mo — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 08:56:28 +0000

Nearly all of the things you assert happens to be supprisingly accurate and that makes me ponder why I had not looked at this in this light previously. This piece truly did turn the light on for me as far as this subject goes. But at this time there is actually one particular factor I am not too comfy with and whilst I make an effort to reconcile that with the actual core theme of the position, let me observe exactly what all the rest of your visitors have to point out.Well done.

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 www. Two of them worked with and without. The third, the one I submitted in this post did only work with 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 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?