12 ms·

To www or not www

208 points by jacobwg 10y ago

mattcoles 10y ago
Am I reading this wrong or, does this only apply to people who are netlify customers?
- tyingq 10y ago
  It applies to any service where having them host your domain is done by publishing a CNAME record. But, that's not the only way to do that sort of thing. Firebase, for example, allows you to use A records pointing at their IP addresses. Cloudflare and WordPress.com allow you to make them the authoritative server for all your records, then they provide an edit interface. Netlify doesn't mention these as good options, probably because they don't have them to offer. Edit: Apparently they do offer these options, but have their own reasons for preferring the CNAME approach
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I host my own sites and simply use A name records. > When it looks up example.netlify.com, it connects to our advanced traffic director, that returns an A record with an IP address of the server from our pool of currently available CDN nodes that’s geographically closest to the end user. It looks like the way their DNS redirects/loadbalacing work is the reason they don't simply allow A records to a static IP. This gets into the whole "you could be redirected to other servers based on your geographical location" issue; and not necessarily your location but the location of your DNS server! I'm not sure if Netlify does this, but Akami does work with ISPs DNS servers around the world to return different results to get to the closest CDNs. This is why using Google DNS (8.8.8.8) resulted in slower loads for Akami customers.
  - bobfunk 10y ago
    Author here. We do actually offer all of these options. We offer a public IP address for A records pointing to a our main load balancer. This will send all traffic to a single origin instead of serving your HTML pages out of our global CDN. We also offer DNS hosting for pro plans and up. When you move your DNS to Netlify, the caveat about naked domains doesn't apply (as mentioned in the first paragraph), since we hook the domain record straight into our global traffic director. For enterprise customers we also offer an anycasted IP address that lets you use our CDN with a normal A record, but we still recommend either using our DNS hosting or a www domain since the DNS based traffic direction is faster at responding to localized issues and offers more precise traffic distribution.
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      Wouldn't a simpler (for the end customer, not for you) solution be to use Anycast on a (or block of) IP addresses and then let folks always use A records as intended? Solves the ANAME non-local caching issue and also handles people using DNS servers not nearby to them.
      - bobfunk 10y ago
        We do run an anycast CDN network, but there's a lot of limitations on BGP routing compared to CDN based traffic direction. We can only route BGP requests to hardware we control, whereas we can add PoPs in all the major cloud providers on our DNS based network. We can then use tools like Cedexis or DYNs internet intelligence to identify where the different cloud providers have the best networking and peering agreements and piggy back on that + their DDoS mitigation. This means we get a combination of all the best AWS/Google Cloud/Rackspace/DO, etc, etc has to offer in that aspect. On the DNS based traffic director we can also do very quick traffic decisions (20s TTL, instant changes) whereas on our BGP routed anycast IP we have to be more conservative and force 10 minute intervals between any up/down changes for a PoP.
        kyledrake 10y ago
        I did GeoDNS + Unicast IPs for a while. I had a really rough time making it work, and we ended up building our own anycast network (https://status.neocities.org https://status.neocities.org) Aside from the root domain issues (and less options for market-priced bandwidth), "GeoDNS + Cloud" pushes your traffic into someone else's ASN, which means complaints end up being sent to them, and your hosting is effectively governed not just by one, but by two different ToSes. This isn't a big deal for a couple thousand sites (unless they're huge), but once you start getting into the hundreds of thousands, you'll see a significant spike in issues (phishing, malware, spam, DMCA, legal threats, etc.) that get sent to whomever owns that IP address. After getting too many of these complaints, those other providers can decide you're just not worth the effort and boot you off their servers. Crazy hypothesis? Sounds like it would be, but it happens: https://twitter.com/surge_sh/status/685164708861624325 https://twitter.com/surge_sh/status/685164708861624325. DO did the same thing to us when we tried to use them for part of our CDN early on. After that, I tried three other cloud services that either did the same thing or threatened to do the same thing (to say nothing about the ridiculously overpriced bandwidth). The choice we were left with: Get our own AS, or die. Mind you, this was over < 30 abuse reports per month, not thousands. Most of these providers are designed for a single company or a wordpress blog, they're not designed (and not really equipped) for usage as infrastructure for a web hosting provider with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of customers. Building out the anycast CDN was a "drinking from the firehose" experience and had some upfront costs I would have rather not paid, but it solved this existential problem for us permanently, and probably saved our life. From experience, I do think you'll have to do this eventually (or at least do GeoDNS + unicast with your own IPs and AS).
tscs37 10y ago
The main problem is, in my opinion, that CNAME is broken for the root domain but something that can hardly be fixed on such an ancient protocol without some pain. What Cloudflare and DNSimple are doing is the right thing. I hope that CNAME flattening or ALIAS records become some kind of standard.
- bobfunk 10y ago
  That would be great to see and would solve a real issue for many users of services like ours (or Heroku, GitHub pages, etc, etc, etc). There are gotchas however, since you now depend on two levels of DNS based traffic direction and we have sometimes run into issues where DNS providers offering ALIAS records simply cached one DNS respond and sent all DNS lookups to the same CDN pop regardless of their location :/
- p49k 10y ago
  Could you explain more about what Cloudflare/DNSimple are doing to workaround this, from a technical standpoint?
  - tscs37 10y ago
    It's explained in the article, but the TL;DR is that CF and DNSimple are simple pretending that a CNAME on the root domain is the corresponding A or AAAA record instead. It breaks geographical CDN a bit but it works somewhat.
arihant 10y ago
I understand the article walks through the technical aspects. However, having seen a lot of non-savvy users use Internet, I am firmly with WWW. Probably because of association and all major "established" companies using www, people associate it with strength. I have learned it to be important in similar ways that a .com extension is. If the site did not have www, most people assumed it is probably made by kids, who do not have www yet. See, most people do not understand that www is not a domain like .com which you have to buy. So for average joe consumer, it signals strength. For an enterprise customer, it probably does too. So unless your product is for savvy users or zen-like designers, I'd stick with www. A lot of people think that naked domain is cleaner. It is actually not, since the average mind is conditioned to read www.x.com, and you have https://x.com https://x.com. It's cleaner in the sense that a face is cleaner without a nose.
- tristanperry 10y ago
  I agree and not sure why you've been downvoted originally. I've also seen plenty of non-tech-savvy users use the internet who seem almost confused if a website isn't 'using www'.
  - Ensorceled 10y ago
    Exactly. We used a naked domain for a while and had to switch because a percentage of people kept getting "worried" about the missing www. I think if you have a tech target audience this doesn't matter but for general consumers, it's still an issue.
- d0vs 10y ago
  I have trouble believing this to be honest. Any hard evidence?
  - arihant 10y ago
    It's anecdotal. However, it should not be hard to test it out with 10 non-tech friends. I also don't recall having my credit card on file on any website that uses naked domain. That's pure correlation. Which goes on to show how valid any hard evidence on this issue would be. Performing your own little user study is the best way to take a stance, I believe.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Navarr 10y ago
This could be solved by a new record, of course, but how many years exactly would that take? So many companies would have to jump on board. Thinking a record like `DELEGATE <comma delimited list of record types> <priority> <name server>` or _something_.
- Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
  > So many companies would have to jump on board. Noob question: what companies would have to jump onboard to get a new record up and running? Could it not just be one company like DNSimple who first adopts it?
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    My computer doesn't understand your new record type, so if you want me to see your site, you're going to have to wait until I upgrade.
    - greggyb 10y ago
      Using 'computer' is a bit disingenuous there. Upgrading a computer sounds like you're buying a new laptop or replacing hardware to deal with a software protocol change.
      - tedunangst 10y ago
        The software installed on my computer doesn't understand your new record type, so if you want me to see your site, you're going to have to wait until I upgrade it.
        greggyb 10y ago
        I have a hunch you upgrade at least once every six months or so, often to music (; My point was that your wording made it should much more like a hardware upgrade, which is on a slower cycle for sure. And I think you'd probably good. I hear your preferred OS has a good track record for implementing new networking stuff quickly.
zimbatm 10y ago
After having tried both I'm very much in the WWW camp. Even though the naked domain looks nicer, it's just not worth the hassle. > End users save an extra DNS lookup Most intermediate resolvers will return both the CNAME and A record in one response anyways. Another issue with naked domains is that all the cookies are automatically served on subdomains as well. It's just another hassle to worry about when trying to keep the cdn clean or wondering why a session works only in specific cases.
- tradersam 10y ago
  So you're "very much" in the WWW camp but you don't even use it on your own site. Curious.
  - aidos 10y ago
    That's a slightly strange personal attack. Their site may be one of the ones where they tried the naked domains.
    - tradersam 10y ago
      It wasn't a personal attack, literally only an observation.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        The way you word the statement and then append "Curious." makes it somewhat hostile. It's a callout, not just an observation. "I'm curious why you say you're 'very much' in the WWW camp but you don't use it on your own site." would not have the same tendency to register as an attack.
        gkya 10y ago
        That's just a comment written in a second or two, not a verse from the bible. No need to dissect it this deep. If this is hostile, asking "how are you" is too, implying one may be in bad shape.
mugsie 10y ago
This is why I wish that as part of HTTP 2 they had allowed the use of SRV records and gotten it built into the browsers / clients etc. SRV records are far superior - its a priority and weighted list of hosts for a protocol, which could really cut down on load balancing complexity.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  Is that relevant to HTTP/2, though? Does HTTP/2 say anything about DNS at all?
- cobookman 10y ago
  Isn't that the same as doing DNS round robin? Also with software defined networking load balancing you can have one user facing ip be backed by many servers.
  - mugsie 10y ago
    No, DNS round robin has ... issues. With SRV, you can set a priority, so it goes to a set of hosts first, then falls back. You can also weight traffic so that some hosts get more than others. (also host is actually an A (or AAAA) record - so it could have multiple values as well) > Also with software defined networking load balancing you can have one user facing ip be backed by many servers. Sure - but software defined (or normal) load balancing is usually inside the datacenter or region. Its another tier behind the DNS layer.
    - teddyh 10y ago
      Also, DNS round robin won’t work with IPv6. At all. Round robin DNS depends on a client connecting to the first address record it receives in the DNS reply, and the DNS server altering its responses to set different addresses as the first one each time it sends a DNS response. But with IPv6, a client host is required to connect to the address closest to its own (as determined by the longest range of common bits), regardless of the adress’ position in the DNS reply.
- rodgerd 10y ago
ne01 10y ago
At SunSed, we use Google HTTP(S) Load Balancer which allows us to load balance our entire infrastructure via a single IP. Our users don't need to worry about CNAME vs A records they can do what ever they want with the IP, since we don't need to change this IP there is no benefit for using a CNAME. On top of that SSL handshake for HTTPS happens at Google front ends which reduces the load on our servers. Also we can send traffic to different sets of VMs based on the URL! How cool is that? I really think that Google's HTTP Load balancer is the hidden gem of Google Cloud.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  > On top of that SSL handshake for HTTPS happens at Google front ends which reduces the load on our servers. Also we can send traffic to different sets of VMs based on the URL! How cool is that? Very cool - let's just hope Google is better at hiding contents of some random memory than Cloudflare.
  - ne01 10y ago
    Do you operate your own CDN? If not, then basically on any CDN you need to trust them with the SSL certificates unless you serve your content over HTTP. Unless you don't use a CDN at all!
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      I can't tell what your point is. Thats why we don't want them exposing random bits of their memory.
    - im3w1l 10y ago
      You could give them a certificate that is only valid for cdn.example.com, no?
      - ne01 10y ago
        Yes. But it's best to serve your entire website (including the HTML pages) via a CDN to reduce latency.
esotericsean 10y ago
www is dead.
- ojm 10y ago
  Long live www.
rgj 10y ago
A few months ago, we built https://www.forcewww.com/ https://www.forcewww.com/ to make our lives, and that of our customers, and everyone else, easier.
teddyh 10y ago
> If you want to be able to receive email on your domain, you’ll need to set MX records at the apex domain. With a CNAME, no other records can be set. > Want to validate your domain for webmaster tools? Or for the DNS validation required for some domain validated SSL certificates? Now you have to add a TXT record to the apex domain. If you already have a CNAME, again, that’s not allowed. It’s actually worse than that. All domains have, for technical DNS reasons, both a SOA record and at least one NS record in them at the “apex” domain. This would conflict with an apex CNAME record. Therefore, you can’t have a CNAME on an apex domain, even if it would otherwise be empty. (There is a technical, and very theoretical, way around this limitation: The administrators of the top-level .com domain could, for example, add a CNAME record directly into the top-level domain zone. This would be valid, technically, but good luck convincing the various parties involved to do this.)
peterwwillis 10y ago
Reasons to use www: * Cookies for the root domain get sent to all subdomains, so a subdomain for static content still gets flooded with cookies, slowing down requests. Now subdomains will get cookies you may not want them getting, complicating site design. You can end up sending dozens of kilobytes of cookies with each request due to the www-less cookies. The way around this is buying whole new domain names just for static content, and then duplicating SSL and all the other requirements for this new domain. Or hoping RFC 2965/6265 won't break anything using your site. * There is a security boost by the same-origin not allowing a subdomain to hijack cookies for the root domain ("forums.foobar.com" could be made to set a cookie that "foobar.com" interprets, which can be used to hijack user sessions; this would not happen on www). This problem affected Github and they had to implement complicated workarounds. * It is easier and more flexible to configure a round robin of frontend hosts with a CNAME (on www) than by A records on the root domain. If your cloud hosting provider's IP changes, they can change their hostname records without needing to modify your DNS records - less work for you and them. And if you think a single static anycast address could never have a routing problem, think again. * Google will (or did in the past) ding you for duplicate content. The same content on foobar.com/ and www.foobar.com/ will appear as duplicate. Providing the content only on www separates it from other content and makes it easier to search subdomain-specific content. (This won't happen if one of them is 301 redirected to the other, however) Reasons not to use www: * "It looks cleaner." People, you can 301 redirect your www-less site to www, gain all the advantages of using www, and the only "hassle" will be in how the address bar looks.
- iaml 10y ago
  This comment convinced me to switch to www while article and other comments didn't. Thank you for a detailed reply.
- z3t4 10y ago
  You need A records for DNS round robin. http://serverfault.com/questions/574072/can-we-have-multiple-cnames-for-a-single-name http://serverfault.com/questions/574072/can-we-have-multiple...
sytse 10y ago
Don't make the mistake I made: host different content on www.gitlab.com (static site) than GitLab.com (application). People expect them to be the same. Ended up moving the static site to about.GitLab.com
- warent 10y ago
  Oh my I always have my www.* domains alas to the site without the www. by default. While you assumed people will almost always think they're different, I'm assuming people will almost always think they're the same. I wonder how many people get frustrated by being redirected from the www to it's naked counterpart before spamming refresh and leaving in defeated frustration... Uh oh
  - sytse 10y ago
    Yeah, big mistake on my part. I don't understand why you're mentioning a redirect, that was not something we were doing.
ef4 10y ago
It's odd to hear a CDN complaining about this limitation when it has already been solved for well over a decade by other leading CDNs. Akamai can serve your apex domain from their edge servers. They do it by giving different answers for the A record to different users, based on where each user is coming from. All that's required is that you use them as your NS.
- bobfunk 10y ago
  If you read the start of the article you'll see we do that as well. This only applies to people that don't use netlify for DNS.
nkkollaw 10y ago
This is an ad... Why is it on the front page? The article brings absolutely no value.
- adventured 10y ago
  104 comments says that you're wrong. There is a many years long discussion about www vs non-www and this is a continuation of that. It served the purpose of sparking the conversation, that was its value.
alfredxing 10y ago
I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention anycast, which is more or less the "correct" way of using a CDN on an apex domain, since for the user's purposes it's just a static IP address. I find anycast to be convenient even for subdomains, since it isn't affected by things like DNS caching, (although things like edns-client-subnet apparently help with that). I'm actually currently looking for a CDN for my website. I don't like www (just personal preference) so anycast is pretty important to me, but there don't seem to be a lot of providers offering anycast for decent price. The closest I've seen is Google's Cloud CDN, which out of all the CDN's I've tried (a lot), is one of the best, but for a small site like mine I tend to get more cache misses than hits (simply due to eviction). Maybe I'll write up a blog post about this issue :)
gumby 10y ago
Why use CNAME at all? You can put the same IP address into as many A records as floats your boat. Bonus: saves a round trip to the DNS server.
- mozumder 10y ago
  Yes! CNAME is a solution looking for a problem. Just use A records, everything is just better that way.
- newsat13 10y ago
  Surely AAAA these days :-)
- jrochkind1 10y ago
  Because it lets different organizations/organizational units control different parts of the resolution. for example, you don't want to give heroku control of your whole dns (and they don't want to be in the dns business), but you want to let heroku change the actual network ip addresses that handle your app on their own, you don't even want to have to know what it is. cnames are what make 'the cloud' work.
proyb2 10y ago
At least Facebook don't uses WWW.
- Hurtak 10y ago
  They do
  - proyb2 10y ago
    I did tested earlier it was shown as facebook.com but now it shown www.facebook.com. They are something, after this discussion.
shmerl 10y ago
www is the relic of the early Internet. Really no point in it today.
wheelerwj 10y ago
this is slightly off topic, but is there anyone who can elaborate a little bit on why/where/how netlify differs from heroku? it's a little more expensive and you cant host your back end, so im a little confused of the value provided.
- cardosof 10y ago
  I find it perfect to host static pages generated with hugo.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    hugo looks pretty cool, thanks!
22goodman 10y ago
Short answer: Dont www Long answer: Do www
kerouanton 10y ago
Adding www Doesn't make any sense for URL shorteners for example. The same occurs on media like Twitter where chars are counted and "precious": using www. adds 4 chars to the message (in theory, since those url shorteners are in help). Another detail I've noticed since wide adoption of browsers that include a single combined url/search entry field. Most people don't even care about the exact URL, they just enter the name they believe the website is, and let the search engine do the job if mistyped or inexistant. (That leads to phishing attacks).
- DrScump 10y ago
  Do (informed) people even use URl shorteners anymore, given that they become a malware vector?
  - kerouanton 10y ago
    I agree, but unfortunately most major corporations/websites do shorten urls...
JohnTHaller 10y ago
It very much depends on the age of your target market. I'd say there's a cutoff around age 30 where people simply omit the www. when talking about addresses and assume everything is just whatever.com.

To www or not www

208 points by jacobwg 10y ago

mattcoles 10y ago

Am I reading this wrong or, does this only apply to people who are netlify customers?

tyingq 10y ago
It applies to any service where having them host your domain is done by publishing a CNAME record. But, that's not the only way to do that sort of thing. Firebase, for example, allows you to use A records pointing at their IP addresses. Cloudflare and WordPress.com allow you to make them the authoritative server for all your records, then they provide an edit interface. Netlify doesn't mention these as good options, probably because they don't have them to offer. Edit: Apparently they do offer these options, but have their own reasons for preferring the CNAME approach
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I host my own sites and simply use A name records. > When it looks up example.netlify.com, it connects to our advanced traffic director, that returns an A record with an IP address of the server from our pool of currently available CDN nodes that’s geographically closest to the end user. It looks like the way their DNS redirects/loadbalacing work is the reason they don't simply allow A records to a static IP. This gets into the whole "you could be redirected to other servers based on your geographical location" issue; and not necessarily your location but the location of your DNS server! I'm not sure if Netlify does this, but Akami does work with ISPs DNS servers around the world to return different results to get to the closest CDNs. This is why using Google DNS (8.8.8.8) resulted in slower loads for Akami customers.
- bobfunk 10y ago
  Author here. We do actually offer all of these options. We offer a public IP address for A records pointing to a our main load balancer. This will send all traffic to a single origin instead of serving your HTML pages out of our global CDN. We also offer DNS hosting for pro plans and up. When you move your DNS to Netlify, the caveat about naked domains doesn't apply (as mentioned in the first paragraph), since we hook the domain record straight into our global traffic director. For enterprise customers we also offer an anycasted IP address that lets you use our CDN with a normal A record, but we still recommend either using our DNS hosting or a www domain since the DNS based traffic direction is faster at responding to localized issues and offers more precise traffic distribution.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    Wouldn't a simpler (for the end customer, not for you) solution be to use Anycast on a (or block of) IP addresses and then let folks always use A records as intended? Solves the ANAME non-local caching issue and also handles people using DNS servers not nearby to them.
    - bobfunk 10y ago
      We do run an anycast CDN network, but there's a lot of limitations on BGP routing compared to CDN based traffic direction. We can only route BGP requests to hardware we control, whereas we can add PoPs in all the major cloud providers on our DNS based network. We can then use tools like Cedexis or DYNs internet intelligence to identify where the different cloud providers have the best networking and peering agreements and piggy back on that + their DDoS mitigation. This means we get a combination of all the best AWS/Google Cloud/Rackspace/DO, etc, etc has to offer in that aspect. On the DNS based traffic director we can also do very quick traffic decisions (20s TTL, instant changes) whereas on our BGP routed anycast IP we have to be more conservative and force 10 minute intervals between any up/down changes for a PoP.
      - kyledrake 10y ago
        I did GeoDNS + Unicast IPs for a while. I had a really rough time making it work, and we ended up building our own anycast network (https://status.neocities.org https://status.neocities.org) Aside from the root domain issues (and less options for market-priced bandwidth), "GeoDNS + Cloud" pushes your traffic into someone else's ASN, which means complaints end up being sent to them, and your hosting is effectively governed not just by one, but by two different ToSes. This isn't a big deal for a couple thousand sites (unless they're huge), but once you start getting into the hundreds of thousands, you'll see a significant spike in issues (phishing, malware, spam, DMCA, legal threats, etc.) that get sent to whomever owns that IP address. After getting too many of these complaints, those other providers can decide you're just not worth the effort and boot you off their servers. Crazy hypothesis? Sounds like it would be, but it happens: https://twitter.com/surge_sh/status/685164708861624325 https://twitter.com/surge_sh/status/685164708861624325. DO did the same thing to us when we tried to use them for part of our CDN early on. After that, I tried three other cloud services that either did the same thing or threatened to do the same thing (to say nothing about the ridiculously overpriced bandwidth). The choice we were left with: Get our own AS, or die. Mind you, this was over < 30 abuse reports per month, not thousands. Most of these providers are designed for a single company or a wordpress blog, they're not designed (and not really equipped) for usage as infrastructure for a web hosting provider with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of customers. Building out the anycast CDN was a "drinking from the firehose" experience and had some upfront costs I would have rather not paid, but it solved this existential problem for us permanently, and probably saved our life. From experience, I do think you'll have to do this eventually (or at least do GeoDNS + unicast with your own IPs and AS).

tscs37 10y ago

The main problem is, in my opinion, that CNAME is broken for the root domain but something that can hardly be fixed on such an ancient protocol without some pain. What Cloudflare and DNSimple are doing is the right thing. I hope that CNAME flattening or ALIAS records become some kind of standard.

bobfunk 10y ago
That would be great to see and would solve a real issue for many users of services like ours (or Heroku, GitHub pages, etc, etc, etc). There are gotchas however, since you now depend on two levels of DNS based traffic direction and we have sometimes run into issues where DNS providers offering ALIAS records simply cached one DNS respond and sent all DNS lookups to the same CDN pop regardless of their location :/
p49k 10y ago
Could you explain more about what Cloudflare/DNSimple are doing to workaround this, from a technical standpoint?
- tscs37 10y ago
  It's explained in the article, but the TL;DR is that CF and DNSimple are simple pretending that a CNAME on the root domain is the corresponding A or AAAA record instead. It breaks geographical CDN a bit but it works somewhat.

arihant 10y ago

I understand the article walks through the technical aspects. However, having seen a lot of non-savvy users use Internet, I am firmly with WWW. Probably because of association and all major "established" companies using www, people associate it with strength. I have learned it to be important in similar ways that a .com extension is. If the site did not have www, most people assumed it is probably made by kids, who do not have www yet. See, most people do not understand that www is not a domain like .com which you have to buy. So for average joe consumer, it signals strength. For an enterprise customer, it probably does too. So unless your product is for savvy users or zen-like designers, I'd stick with www. A lot of people think that naked domain is cleaner. It is actually not, since the average mind is conditioned to read www.x.com, and you have https://x.com https://x.com. It's cleaner in the sense that a face is cleaner without a nose.

tristanperry 10y ago
I agree and not sure why you've been downvoted originally. I've also seen plenty of non-tech-savvy users use the internet who seem almost confused if a website isn't 'using www'.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Exactly. We used a naked domain for a while and had to switch because a percentage of people kept getting "worried" about the missing www. I think if you have a tech target audience this doesn't matter but for general consumers, it's still an issue.
d0vs 10y ago
I have trouble believing this to be honest. Any hard evidence?
- arihant 10y ago
  It's anecdotal. However, it should not be hard to test it out with 10 non-tech friends. I also don't recall having my credit card on file on any website that uses naked domain. That's pure correlation. Which goes on to show how valid any hard evidence on this issue would be. Performing your own little user study is the best way to take a stance, I believe.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Navarr 10y ago

This could be solved by a new record, of course, but how many years exactly would that take? So many companies would have to jump on board. Thinking a record like `DELEGATE <comma delimited list of record types> <priority> <name server>` or _something_.

Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
> So many companies would have to jump on board. Noob question: what companies would have to jump onboard to get a new record up and running? Could it not just be one company like DNSimple who first adopts it?
- tedunangst 10y ago
  My computer doesn't understand your new record type, so if you want me to see your site, you're going to have to wait until I upgrade.
  - greggyb 10y ago
    Using 'computer' is a bit disingenuous there. Upgrading a computer sounds like you're buying a new laptop or replacing hardware to deal with a software protocol change.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      The software installed on my computer doesn't understand your new record type, so if you want me to see your site, you're going to have to wait until I upgrade it.
      - greggyb 10y ago
        I have a hunch you upgrade at least once every six months or so, often to music (; My point was that your wording made it should much more like a hardware upgrade, which is on a slower cycle for sure. And I think you'd probably good. I hear your preferred OS has a good track record for implementing new networking stuff quickly.

zimbatm 10y ago

After having tried both I'm very much in the WWW camp. Even though the naked domain looks nicer, it's just not worth the hassle. > End users save an extra DNS lookup Most intermediate resolvers will return both the CNAME and A record in one response anyways. Another issue with naked domains is that all the cookies are automatically served on subdomains as well. It's just another hassle to worry about when trying to keep the cdn clean or wondering why a session works only in specific cases.

tradersam 10y ago
So you're "very much" in the WWW camp but you don't even use it on your own site. Curious.
- aidos 10y ago
  That's a slightly strange personal attack. Their site may be one of the ones where they tried the naked domains.
  - tradersam 10y ago
    It wasn't a personal attack, literally only an observation.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      The way you word the statement and then append "Curious." makes it somewhat hostile. It's a callout, not just an observation. "I'm curious why you say you're 'very much' in the WWW camp but you don't use it on your own site." would not have the same tendency to register as an attack.
      - gkya 10y ago
        That's just a comment written in a second or two, not a verse from the bible. No need to dissect it this deep. If this is hostile, asking "how are you" is too, implying one may be in bad shape.

mugsie 10y ago

This is why I wish that as part of HTTP 2 they had allowed the use of SRV records and gotten it built into the browsers / clients etc. SRV records are far superior - its a priority and weighted list of hosts for a protocol, which could really cut down on load balancing complexity.

eriknstr 10y ago
Is that relevant to HTTP/2, though? Does HTTP/2 say anything about DNS at all?
cobookman 10y ago
Isn't that the same as doing DNS round robin? Also with software defined networking load balancing you can have one user facing ip be backed by many servers.
- mugsie 10y ago
  No, DNS round robin has ... issues. With SRV, you can set a priority, so it goes to a set of hosts first, then falls back. You can also weight traffic so that some hosts get more than others. (also host is actually an A (or AAAA) record - so it could have multiple values as well) > Also with software defined networking load balancing you can have one user facing ip be backed by many servers. Sure - but software defined (or normal) load balancing is usually inside the datacenter or region. Its another tier behind the DNS layer.
  - teddyh 10y ago
    Also, DNS round robin won’t work with IPv6. At all. Round robin DNS depends on a client connecting to the first address record it receives in the DNS reply, and the DNS server altering its responses to set different addresses as the first one each time it sends a DNS response. But with IPv6, a client host is required to connect to the address closest to its own (as determined by the longest range of common bits), regardless of the adress’ position in the DNS reply.
rodgerd 10y ago

ne01 10y ago

At SunSed, we use Google HTTP(S) Load Balancer which allows us to load balance our entire infrastructure via a single IP. Our users don't need to worry about CNAME vs A records they can do what ever they want with the IP, since we don't need to change this IP there is no benefit for using a CNAME. On top of that SSL handshake for HTTPS happens at Google front ends which reduces the load on our servers. Also we can send traffic to different sets of VMs based on the URL! How cool is that? I really think that Google's HTTP Load balancer is the hidden gem of Google Cloud.

Drdrdrq 10y ago
> On top of that SSL handshake for HTTPS happens at Google front ends which reduces the load on our servers. Also we can send traffic to different sets of VMs based on the URL! How cool is that? Very cool - let's just hope Google is better at hiding contents of some random memory than Cloudflare.
- ne01 10y ago
  Do you operate your own CDN? If not, then basically on any CDN you need to trust them with the SSL certificates unless you serve your content over HTTP. Unless you don't use a CDN at all!
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    I can't tell what your point is. Thats why we don't want them exposing random bits of their memory.
  - im3w1l 10y ago
    You could give them a certificate that is only valid for cdn.example.com, no?
    - ne01 10y ago
      Yes. But it's best to serve your entire website (including the HTML pages) via a CDN to reduce latency.

esotericsean 10y ago

www is dead.

ojm 10y ago
Long live www.

rgj 10y ago

A few months ago, we built https://www.forcewww.com/ https://www.forcewww.com/ to make our lives, and that of our customers, and everyone else, easier.

teddyh 10y ago

> If you want to be able to receive email on your domain, you’ll need to set MX records at the apex domain. With a CNAME, no other records can be set. > Want to validate your domain for webmaster tools? Or for the DNS validation required for some domain validated SSL certificates? Now you have to add a TXT record to the apex domain. If you already have a CNAME, again, that’s not allowed. It’s actually worse than that. All domains have, for technical DNS reasons, both a SOA record and at least one NS record in them at the “apex” domain. This would conflict with an apex CNAME record. Therefore, you can’t have a CNAME on an apex domain, even if it would otherwise be empty. (There is a technical, and very theoretical, way around this limitation: The administrators of the top-level .com domain could, for example, add a CNAME record directly into the top-level domain zone. This would be valid, technically, but good luck convincing the various parties involved to do this.)

peterwwillis 10y ago

Reasons to use www: * Cookies for the root domain get sent to all subdomains, so a subdomain for static content still gets flooded with cookies, slowing down requests. Now subdomains will get cookies you may not want them getting, complicating site design. You can end up sending dozens of kilobytes of cookies with each request due to the www-less cookies. The way around this is buying whole new domain names just for static content, and then duplicating SSL and all the other requirements for this new domain. Or hoping RFC 2965/6265 won't break anything using your site. * There is a security boost by the same-origin not allowing a subdomain to hijack cookies for the root domain ("forums.foobar.com" could be made to set a cookie that "foobar.com" interprets, which can be used to hijack user sessions; this would not happen on www). This problem affected Github and they had to implement complicated workarounds. * It is easier and more flexible to configure a round robin of frontend hosts with a CNAME (on www) than by A records on the root domain. If your cloud hosting provider's IP changes, they can change their hostname records without needing to modify your DNS records - less work for you and them. And if you think a single static anycast address could never have a routing problem, think again. * Google will (or did in the past) ding you for duplicate content. The same content on foobar.com/ and www.foobar.com/ will appear as duplicate. Providing the content only on www separates it from other content and makes it easier to search subdomain-specific content. (This won't happen if one of them is 301 redirected to the other, however) Reasons not to use www: * "It looks cleaner." People, you can 301 redirect your www-less site to www, gain all the advantages of using www, and the only "hassle" will be in how the address bar looks.

iaml 10y ago
This comment convinced me to switch to www while article and other comments didn't. Thank you for a detailed reply.
z3t4 10y ago
You need A records for DNS round robin. http://serverfault.com/questions/574072/can-we-have-multiple-cnames-for-a-single-name http://serverfault.com/questions/574072/can-we-have-multiple...

sytse 10y ago

Don't make the mistake I made: host different content on www.gitlab.com (static site) than GitLab.com (application). People expect them to be the same. Ended up moving the static site to about.GitLab.com

warent 10y ago
Oh my I always have my www.* domains alas to the site without the www. by default. While you assumed people will almost always think they're different, I'm assuming people will almost always think they're the same. I wonder how many people get frustrated by being redirected from the www to it's naked counterpart before spamming refresh and leaving in defeated frustration... Uh oh
- sytse 10y ago
  Yeah, big mistake on my part. I don't understand why you're mentioning a redirect, that was not something we were doing.

ef4 10y ago

It's odd to hear a CDN complaining about this limitation when it has already been solved for well over a decade by other leading CDNs. Akamai can serve your apex domain from their edge servers. They do it by giving different answers for the A record to different users, based on where each user is coming from. All that's required is that you use them as your NS.

bobfunk 10y ago
If you read the start of the article you'll see we do that as well. This only applies to people that don't use netlify for DNS.

nkkollaw 10y ago

This is an ad... Why is it on the front page? The article brings absolutely no value.

adventured 10y ago
104 comments says that you're wrong. There is a many years long discussion about www vs non-www and this is a continuation of that. It served the purpose of sparking the conversation, that was its value.

alfredxing 10y ago

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention anycast, which is more or less the "correct" way of using a CDN on an apex domain, since for the user's purposes it's just a static IP address. I find anycast to be convenient even for subdomains, since it isn't affected by things like DNS caching, (although things like edns-client-subnet apparently help with that). I'm actually currently looking for a CDN for my website. I don't like www (just personal preference) so anycast is pretty important to me, but there don't seem to be a lot of providers offering anycast for decent price. The closest I've seen is Google's Cloud CDN, which out of all the CDN's I've tried (a lot), is one of the best, but for a small site like mine I tend to get more cache misses than hits (simply due to eviction). Maybe I'll write up a blog post about this issue :)

gumby 10y ago

Why use CNAME at all? You can put the same IP address into as many A records as floats your boat. Bonus: saves a round trip to the DNS server.

mozumder 10y ago
Yes! CNAME is a solution looking for a problem. Just use A records, everything is just better that way.
newsat13 10y ago
Surely AAAA these days :-)
jrochkind1 10y ago
Because it lets different organizations/organizational units control different parts of the resolution. for example, you don't want to give heroku control of your whole dns (and they don't want to be in the dns business), but you want to let heroku change the actual network ip addresses that handle your app on their own, you don't even want to have to know what it is. cnames are what make 'the cloud' work.

proyb2 10y ago

At least Facebook don't uses WWW.

Hurtak 10y ago
They do
- proyb2 10y ago
  I did tested earlier it was shown as facebook.com but now it shown www.facebook.com. They are something, after this discussion.

shmerl 10y ago

www is the relic of the early Internet. Really no point in it today.

wheelerwj 10y ago

this is slightly off topic, but is there anyone who can elaborate a little bit on why/where/how netlify differs from heroku? it's a little more expensive and you cant host your back end, so im a little confused of the value provided.

cardosof 10y ago
I find it perfect to host static pages generated with hugo.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  hugo looks pretty cool, thanks!

22goodman 10y ago

Short answer: Dont www Long answer: Do www

kerouanton 10y ago

Adding www Doesn't make any sense for URL shorteners for example. The same occurs on media like Twitter where chars are counted and "precious": using www. adds 4 chars to the message (in theory, since those url shorteners are in help). Another detail I've noticed since wide adoption of browsers that include a single combined url/search entry field. Most people don't even care about the exact URL, they just enter the name they believe the website is, and let the search engine do the job if mistyped or inexistant. (That leads to phishing attacks).

DrScump 10y ago
Do (informed) people even use URl shorteners anymore, given that they become a malware vector?
- kerouanton 10y ago
  I agree, but unfortunately most major corporations/websites do shorten urls...

JohnTHaller 10y ago

It very much depends on the age of your target market. I'd say there's a cutoff around age 30 where people simply omit the www. when talking about addresses and assume everything is just whatever.com.