4 ms·

I'm always suspicious of sites that break without 'www'. Either the DNS was setup by a novice and/or someone with little knowledge, the platform that runs it is

by eksith 13y ago

I'm always suspicious of sites that break without 'www'. Either the DNS was setup by a novice and/or someone with little knowledge, the platform that runs it is a convoluted mess or something else is horribly broken. I know that's not really a fair indicator, but "what else is wrong" and "how badly is the rest of it is cobbled together" are the first 2 question that pop into my head.

cbhl 13y ago
It has been argued that putting a web server on a bare domain (without the www) is broken, since you aren't supposed to e.g. use a CNAME on the bare domain (and many hosting providers use CNAMEs to give them the ability to change the IP address hosting a site if something goes wrong in one datacenter).
- eksith 13y ago
  Argued by whom? That seems like an archaic holdover from the early days of the web with no bearing on what's possible today. We aren't supposed to link to resources that don't exist either and (while it's not specifically about DNS) that's exactly what URL rewriting is used for today.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    For example: > Using URLs of the form http://example.com/ http://example.com/ creates a number of problems, and we strongly recommend that you avoid it. http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/baredomain http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/baredomain > zone apex domains (also called bare, naked, or root domains) ... have serious availability implications https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains Granted, you don't always have to follow the RFCs... > the DNS RFC (RFC1033) requires the "zone apex" (sometimes called the "root domain" or "naked domain") to be an "A Record," not a CNAME ... Never one to let a RFC stand in the way of a solution to a real problem, we're happy to announce that CloudFlare allows you to set your zone apex to a CNAME http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domai...
    - eksith 13y ago
      * = Wildcard A record often held to the same IP as www (and this is fine according to RFC1034) : http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034#section-4.3.3 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034#section-4.3.3 To be fair, NFS Has had a history of doing things old-school (which is fine for most of their clientele), but the availability implications of Heroku is for something completely different. Also they're a special case with a much more complicated backend.
- nwh 13y ago
  http://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/
  - cbhl 13y ago
    I don't see, in their FAQ, how they deal with "you can't put CNAMEs in the zone apex according to the RFC, but cloud hosting providers like Heroku want me to set a CNAME on any domain pointing to my site". If you only have a dedicated box, or if you have a full time on-pager sysops team, then, yes, it's easy enough to set A records on the zone apex pointing to your web server.
- Stratoscope 13y ago
  Even if that's so, can't you have the non-www domain redirect to the www domain?

by eksith 13y ago

cbhl 13y ago

It has been argued that putting a web server on a bare domain (without the www) is broken, since you aren't supposed to e.g. use a CNAME on the bare domain (and many hosting providers use CNAMEs to give them the ability to change the IP address hosting a site if something goes wrong in one datacenter).

eksith 13y ago
Argued by whom? That seems like an archaic holdover from the early days of the web with no bearing on what's possible today. We aren't supposed to link to resources that don't exist either and (while it's not specifically about DNS) that's exactly what URL rewriting is used for today.
- cbhl 13y ago
  For example: > Using URLs of the form http://example.com/ http://example.com/ creates a number of problems, and we strongly recommend that you avoid it. http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/baredomain http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/baredomain > zone apex domains (also called bare, naked, or root domains) ... have serious availability implications https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains Granted, you don't always have to follow the RFCs... > the DNS RFC (RFC1033) requires the "zone apex" (sometimes called the "root domain" or "naked domain") to be an "A Record," not a CNAME ... Never one to let a RFC stand in the way of a solution to a real problem, we're happy to announce that CloudFlare allows you to set your zone apex to a CNAME http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domai...
  - eksith 13y ago
    * = Wildcard A record often held to the same IP as www (and this is fine according to RFC1034) : http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034#section-4.3.3 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034#section-4.3.3 To be fair, NFS Has had a history of doing things old-school (which is fine for most of their clientele), but the availability implications of Heroku is for something completely different. Also they're a special case with a much more complicated backend.
nwh 13y ago
http://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/
- cbhl 13y ago
  I don't see, in their FAQ, how they deal with "you can't put CNAMEs in the zone apex according to the RFC, but cloud hosting providers like Heroku want me to set a CNAME on any domain pointing to my site". If you only have a dedicated box, or if you have a full time on-pager sysops team, then, yes, it's easy enough to set A records on the zone apex pointing to your web server.
Stratoscope 13y ago
Even if that's so, can't you have the non-www domain redirect to the www domain?