9 ms·

Why use www?

408 points by bergie 12y ago

sandGorgon 12y ago
Can someone comment on the SEO implication? I'm no expert,but I have heard it said that the closer your URL is to the http, the higher weight it is given. For e.g http://ABC.com/my-seo-url http://ABC.com/my-seo-url vs http://www.xyz.com/my-seo-url http://www.xyz.com/my-seo-url
- theseanstewart 12y ago
  If that was the case, you'd see a lot more websites with non-www URLs. It is definitely not a ranking factor.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 12y ago
  There is zero direct SEO implication. www.wikipedia.org is not suffering from the www The only potential implication, is if users prefer your domain with a www or without for some reason, and that that causes a higher engagement level, more clicks in google search results, more social sharing, and so on. That would be considered an indirect SEO impact (and would likely vary widely from site to site and demographic to demographic), as Google does not rank either positively or negatively just for the www.
- SquareWheel 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure the only potential hit would be if users are inconsistent in writing links to your site. If everybody wrote www or non-www it'd be exactly the same. If it's mixed, users/bots are sent through a 301.
electrograv 12y ago
Meta: I'm personally marveling at how such a laughably simple thing ("www." or no prefix) can become such an unnecessarily complicated technical debate due to archaic infrastructure. As an outsider (non-web software developer), I have to say debates like these hint strongly (IMO) of a cargo cult technology culture surrounding web development. Of course I get that we have to work with existing infrastructure; however I must admit it's surprising so many people seem blind to the idea that maybe the issue shouldn't exist in the first place.
- mixmastamyk 12y ago
  It's not so easy to get thousands of players to turn on a dime. Especially when some don't care about your improvement at any particular time, see IE.
akerl_ 12y ago
For the opposite case: http://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/
- Kerrick 12y ago
  And for the humorous case: http://www.www.extra-www.org http://www.www.extra-www.org
- lucisferre 12y ago
  Does that site actually make a case or do they just not like the "www" being there?
  - ma2rten 12y ago
    Yes. By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the 'http://' http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.
    - justizin 12y ago
      that's great, mail servers have an MX record, rather than relying on an A record for the base domain to provide only one service, which can cause confusion with other services.
    - mhurron 12y ago
      > Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? You mean host. www is a host in example.com. Protocol indicator (http/https) and host name (www, mail, bob) have nothing to do with each other. You don't have to do @host.example.com if there is a special DNS record for SMTP to indicate where to actually send mail, without it you do have to do host.example.com. > automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80 What HTTP server? if the URL is www.example.com we connect to the server named www, it could be named bob if we wanted. Without the host name given you have to create a catchall to tell clients to send ALL traffic without a hostname to. The comparison between protocols is really stupid.
AhtiK 12y ago
Performance penalty is no longer an issue with AWS: CloudFront support for root domain/zone apex has been there since June 2013 [1]. DNSMadeEasy has ANAME for somewhat similar purpose [2]. It's worth noting that AWS CloudFront works ONLY with AWS Route 53 for the proper latency-based routing with root domains. Yes, DNSMadeEasy ANAME works with CloudFront too but it's not smart about returning the closest edge to the user. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/06/11/announcing-custom-ssl-certificates-and-zone-apex-support-for-cloudfront/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/06/11/announc... [2] http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/press-release/dns-made-easy-introduces-aname-records/ http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/press-release/dns-made-easy-intro...
- tszming 12y ago
  The issue with cookies mentioned in the article is still valid, which also affect performance.
  - AhtiK 12y ago
    Yep, still valid, cookies are sent. But performance-wise if the cookie is just a session id then maybe sending a few hundred bytes extra with each resource request doesn't even show up in profiling. With cookies the number of connections opened remains the same, amount of bytes received remains the same. Most of the network time with a pageload is wasted on opening a connection for each resource and streaming the output, if there's a need to optimize then instead of getting rid of cookies it's better to concat resources etc or move to SPDY. OR, just buy that second domain for static content if client-side performance becomes that important and sending unneeded cookies feels like a waste :)
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      Odds are your client will send those cookies by some ethernet network, that'll pad every package into a minimum size much larger than the request anyway. And if you get a client that isn't using ethernet (maybe GSM, what is its minimum package size?), they'll probably use large TCP packets too, and pad at that level.
based2 12y ago
6v
gionn 12y ago
old but gold.
d0ugie 12y ago
Perhaps fewer would avoid using naked domains if we hadn't settled on the visually widest and verbally longest to recite letter. Kudos, twitter.
kilovoltaire 12y ago
"Ironically powered by WordPress" is a nice touch.
- pooper 12y ago
  because wordpress.org doesn't use www?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- m52go 12y ago
  not sure why you're getting voted down...i came here to say that same thing. it's kind of funny.
_greim_ 12y ago
No reason is given why you should use www. The only arguments presented here are a couple technical issues with having naked domains. But you could have w.example.com or foo.example.com and address those same problems.
- notatoad 12y ago
  you should use www because it is the convention, and no meaning is assigned to it. if you use w.example.com people will assume the w has some meaning, or try to read your domain as "wexample"
  - _greim_ 12y ago
    If that's the only valid reason to use "www" (as opposed to "mmm" or anything else) then why wouldn't an article titled "Why use www?" mention it? It seems like people are just looking for ways to rationalize their preference for seeing "www" in URLs, so are latching onto any and every possible argument to justify that bias. There are a few valid considerations on both sides, but ultimately this strikes me as just the latest bit of churn in tech fashion.
excitom 12y ago
I dislike www since it is the world's worst acronym, having three times as many syllables as the words it replaces.
- pling 12y ago
  That's why, at least in the UK, we use "dub dub dub".
  - grkvlt 12y ago
    Do we? The most common time-saving pronunciation I have heard simply uses the initial 'w' sounds from the three words, and therefore has three syllables.
    - pling 12y ago
      I've heard that but primarily with inexperienced users.
      - grkvlt 12y ago
        I just looked at the Wikipedia page for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_%22www%22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_%22www%22 and have never seen so much unsourced drivel in my life. For the record, I have been pronouncing it the way I described in the GP comment for the last twenty plus years, so that's some sort of data point.
        pling 12y ago
        Well its Wikipedia. What do you expect. And as for me, it's purely an anecdote. I think it depends on where you are and who you know. Citation needed.
  - jamespharaoh 12y ago
    err, no we don't, sorry!
  - 12y ago
james33 12y ago
If your site has gotten "so big," are you really still going to be using Heroku?
- bshimmin 12y ago
  Rap Genius for one certainly did (may still do for all I know). Hosting anything serious on Heroku seems like craziness to me, but perhaps some people have identified uniquely good reasons to do it...
jpollock 12y ago
You use www for the same reason that the ftp server is ftp.X and the mail server is mail.X. This allows organisations to have logical service locations separate from their current configured location. So, www is your web service. If you'd like a proposal, add a new type of DNS record, like the MX record, specifically for HTTP.
- shabble 12y ago
  Isn't this what the SRV[1] record type is designed to solve generically? Getting adoption at the client end is likely the limiting factor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
  - mattstocum 12y ago
    Yes it is. For some reason supporting SRV for HTTP is too hard https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      For gods sake. Open since 1999!? This bug/request has been sitting since last century.
    - gioele 12y ago
      It looks like one of those bugs requesting a new feature that sits there for years until Chrome implements the same feature (in a Google-specific partial way). Only then Mozilla rushes to implement it, but at that point it is too late and Google takes all the merit for leading the web forward.
- protonfish 12y ago
  No, that is what the TCP port number is for.
  - sethhochberg 12y ago
xyclos 12y ago
lost me at "webmasters", lol.
grkvlt 12y ago
Since the original TBL web server was at 'info.cern.ch' I think everyone has been Doing It Wrong since then, and we should replace 'www' with 'info' everywhere. I'm off to create 'info.not-www.org', I think...
shmerl 12y ago
> Why should I use www? You just shouldn't. It's a relic of the times when protocol was embedded in the URL to differentiate ftp from http or gopher.
- skeletonjelly 12y ago
  You didn't read the linked article did you
lnanek2 12y ago
This is a nice piece about engineering. However, it would be nice to see an A/B test for what the users prefer. The technical drawbacks don't seem large compared to, say, +1% better conversion rate for people seeing your URL in media and typing it into a browser.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  You could easily promote the naked domain and forward traffic from it to the www version of your site.
adrianmacneil 12y ago
I used to be strongly in the no-www camp for aesthetic reasons, but have since come around. There are legitimate reasons why having www (or any subdomain) is important in any large site. The CNAME argument is obsolete since most DNS providers support ALIAS records now. The static no-cookie argument doesn't really matter since you could always serve static content on a separate domain altogether (ex: fbcdn.net). However, if you want to run hosted services on subdomains, you run into an important security issue. For example, say you have Zendesk hosted on support.mysite.com. You don't want to leak session cookies from mysite.com to support.mysite.com. In most browsers, you can just specify the cookie domain and it will only be sent to the root domain. However, NO versions of IE respect this (even IE 10+) [1]. So your IE users will always leak session cookies to hosted services on subdomains. In any reasonably secure site, this is unacceptable (especially when you start using other hosted services for status.mysite.com, careers.mysite.com, etc etc). Unfortunately, this is pretty much impossible to work around, unless you want to ban IE users from using your site entirely. Solution: Just use www (or any other subdomain, if you want to be different) from the start, and save yourself the headache of migrating later. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2009/08/20/wininet-ie-cookie-internals-faq.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2009/08/20/winin...
- ecesena 12y ago
  What about internal services with subdomains? What if, for instance, you have myservice.mysite.com and you want to share cookies among www and myservice? I mean, would you recommend to set cookies with domain mysite.com and thus have a different domain for external services, like support.mysite.net, or...? (genuinely asking, I don't mean to criticize, sorry if the english is not perfect :)
  - dlubarov 12y ago
    Exactly - if you have a combination of trusted and untrusted subdomains, like www.mysite.com support.mysite.com wordpress.mysite.com Then it's impossible to give only certain ones access to your session cookie. You could use *.secure.mysite.com for all internal apps, but that seems ugly. You could also not use subdomains for any internal apps, like Google, but that's limiting in other ways - notably, it makes it impossible to have any security isolation between internal apps.
endergen 12y ago
Cloudflare recently announced support for CNAME functionality from naked domains. See: 'Introducing CNAME Flattening: RFC-Compliant CNAMEs at a Domain's Root' http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-.... Obviously www. is extraneous if you can get the CNAME functionality.
- derickis 12y ago
  Straying off a bit, but I'm using this feature by CloudFlare on my personal site which is hosted on Github. The CNAME Flattening feature is awesome, and according to David Ensinger (http://davidensinger.com/2014/04/transferring-the-dns-from-namecheap-to-cloudflare-for-github-pages/ http://davidensinger.com/2014/04/transferring-the-dns-from-n...) there are a bunch of neat performance boosts too. My site: http://derick.is/ http://derick.is/
- joeyespo 12y ago
  DNSimple offers this too, but they call it an ALIAS record.
everydaypanos 12y ago
Still in no-www camp!
- serf 12y ago
  as long as the translation and redirection is done by the browser somewhat seamlessly (which modern browsers seem to have no problem with on correctly setup websites), I am too. Aesthetically 'www' has never been that pleasant looking.
everydaypanos 12y ago
Still in no-www camp!
kolev 12y ago
URLs without www look uglier to me. The www gives you a visual filler space between the cryptic http:// http:// and the domain, but, again, who cares about URLs nowadays? Also, www makes easy to parse out URLs in text. In addition, people will always try www even if your canonical domain is without it resulting possibly in a redundant redirect and/or dual versions of URL being in existence. Lastly, just like www, .com is here to stay. After so much investment in www and .com from advertising, education, etc., don't expect billions to switch away so easily.
- qu4z-2 12y ago
  Personally I find www. no less cryptic than http:// http://. Additionally http:// http:// is hidden in many browsers these days, so you're left with just {,www.}example.com/ and don't need the filler. Regarding "who cares about urls nowadays?", clearly the people in this thread making passionate arguments for and against a leading www. care :)
  - kolev 12y ago
    I agree most people probably cannot decode WWW, but, as I said, years have been invested to educate the populace that a web address starts with www. and ends with .com. So, when you see www.hello.com, I don't need to put labels and stuff - people know this is an address. If I put "computer.systems", you won't know unless I label.
Thiz 12y ago
A better solution instead of www would be: web.example.com The way it should have been since day one.
- mhartl 12y ago
  MIT still uses it: $ curl -I mit.edu HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Server: AkamaiGHost Content-Length: 0 Location: http://web.mit.edu/ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 03:12:18 GMT Connection: keep-alive (It looks like they were a little sloppy, though; that should probably be a 301 instead of a 302.)
  - skeletonjelly 12y ago
    That might be on purpose from Akamai?
seoguru 12y ago
http://yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html http://yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html "W" is a letter that is not one syllable, for that would be too few, a letter that is not two syllables, for that too would be too few, but a letter, in fact the one letter of all twenty-six that insists upon blathering on and on in its attempt to twist the tongue and overtax the ear, extending to the full three, yes three--three syllables, the legal alphabetical maximum. But wait, my friend. That is only the beginning. We go on to treble the damages by repeating this freak letter, this monstrosity that is one thing, claims to be two other things, but is really three things, not once, not twice, but a full three times, in a nonometric rhapsody fleshed out to the nines, a compound triplicate triumphant cat-o'-nine-tails tongue-lashing, a nonotuple witches' syllabic brew of treble, treble, toil and trouble. It is enough I say! Nine times enough, in fact. :-)
- rasur 12y ago
  In English, yes perhaps. Aber auf Deutsch, man sagt "vey vey vey". Them's the breaks one is dealt by one's language of choice. (I'm English, but in Switzerland, and have clearly noticed the ease of the alternative... ;) )
- ianstormtaylor 12y ago
  Not to mention the extra syllable for "dot".
adventured 12y ago
"You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big." Don't tell these little sites: stackoverflow.com, rapgenius.com, foursquare.com, twitter.com, instagram.com, ask.fm, wordpress.com, imgur.com, vimeo.com, hootsuite.com, github.com
mhartl 12y ago
It is possible to do 301 redirects at the registrar level in a way that preserves the full path, including query strings? This is, I'd like to arrange for example.com/home?a=foo&b=bar to redirect to www.example.com/home?a=foo&b=bar Is there any way to do this without using something more specific like mod_rewrite?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  What's wrong with mod_rewrite?
  - mhartl 12y ago
    It won't work at, e.g., Heroku.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      So? Your redirects don't need to be at Heroku.
      - mhartl 12y ago
        So what if my website is at Heroku?
        TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Well, why use Heroku for redirection? That sounds like overkill. Your registrar may provide web hosting, or possibly forwarding.
        mhartl 12y ago
        Your registrar may provide . . . forwarding. And thus we return to my original question: Is there a way to do forwarding at the registrar level in a way that preserves the rest of the URL structure? If you're willing to work at a less general level than the registrar, a Ruby gem called Refraction used to work for forwarding in Rails projects (I used it for the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and The Tau Manifesto), but Refraction rules included in a recent Rails project (the most recent iteration of http://tauday.com/ http://tauday.com/) were seemingly ignored. Some Googling revealed a couple of possible more up-to-date solutions: https://github.com/cwninja/rack-force_domain https://github.com/cwninja/rack-force_domain https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host I have yet to try them out, but they look promising. As an aside, when someone asks a question of the form "How do I do X without feature Y?", it's rarely helpful to respond with something like "Why not use Y?" Typically, the person asking the question has a reason for not using Y, and by making not using Y part of the question they're trying to avoid exactly the kind of digression that happened in this thread. EDIT (because HN won't let me reply): I agree that it's sometimes worth understanding why they want to do X without Y, but it's best done with a lightness of touch. Otherwise you risk not giving the asker the benefit of the doubt (e.g., via statements like "So? Your redirects don't need to be at Heroku."). It's usually better to either answer the original question as stated or tread very carefully, with phrasing like "I'd like to understand your reasons for not wanting to use Y" rather than the blunter "What's wrong with Y?" UPDATE: I can confirm that [rack-canonical-host](https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host) does the kind of forwarding I wanted, as you can verify by visiting, e.g., http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar, which is correctly forwarded to http://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar http://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar.
digitalWestie 12y ago
This looks an appropriate use of my time.
cyphunk 12y ago
> You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big. nope, sorry. i have no desire for my sites to be big. i prefer rememberable to a few, over big. next. can someone tell me why these people are actually pushing www use? So far the reasons they state make no sense. It sound's like a bunch of grammar addicts getting into the technologist scene. > Twitter, for instance, which does not use www, had to buy new domain names just for static content. and, who cares? If you become a really "big" website I guess you can afford another domain name. > You may not run into any of these issues today, but as your web site grows, you eventually will. What I learned from this. When my site get's so big that I can sniff coke off of male escorts I should hire someone to deal with purchasing more domains for our cookie content issue. thanks, solved.
simonnreynolds 12y ago
I would argue that www. domains are easier and quicker to read, as the domain is located in the centre away from the leading /
hexleo 12y ago
In China, for some people if your web site doesn't use www, they will confused. I told him a domain name, he will add www before. orz
marcosscriven 12y ago
If only phonetically in English it weren't nine syllables:"dou-ble-u dou-ble-u dou-ble-u" I recall the first time hearing it in German - simply 'vay vay vay' - much easier!
- PostOnce 12y ago
  not sure how many people actually say this but i saw a TV ad that said dub dub dub dot siteurlhere dot com it may not be correct but its understandable in context
mellisarob 12y ago
i kind of lovev 'www'
joeyespo 12y ago
> You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big. Isn't this pre-optimizing? You can use naked domains today and redirect tomorrow when it becomes an issue (IF it's still a technical issue we need to worry about at that time). 301 is built for this. Or, when you do become big, this becomes a tiny issues. > Twitter, for instance, which does not use www, had to buy new domain names just for static content. Do you think Twitter struggled to afford this in any way? > You may not run into any of these issues today, but as your web site grows, you eventually will. Again, a big company can easily afford this. Do things that don't scale. Worrying about www should not be your initial concern.

408 points by bergie 12y ago

Can someone comment on the SEO implication? I'm no expert,but I have heard it said that the closer your URL is to the http, the higher weight it is given. For e.g http://ABC.com/my-seo-url http://ABC.com/my-seo-url vs http://www.xyz.com/my-seo-url http://www.xyz.com/my-seo-url

theseanstewart 12y ago
If that was the case, you'd see a lot more websites with non-www URLs. It is definitely not a ranking factor.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
adventured 12y ago
There is zero direct SEO implication. www.wikipedia.org is not suffering from the www The only potential implication, is if users prefer your domain with a www or without for some reason, and that that causes a higher engagement level, more clicks in google search results, more social sharing, and so on. That would be considered an indirect SEO impact (and would likely vary widely from site to site and demographic to demographic), as Google does not rank either positively or negatively just for the www.
SquareWheel 12y ago
I'm pretty sure the only potential hit would be if users are inconsistent in writing links to your site. If everybody wrote www or non-www it'd be exactly the same. If it's mixed, users/bots are sent through a 301.

electrograv 12y ago

Meta: I'm personally marveling at how such a laughably simple thing ("www." or no prefix) can become such an unnecessarily complicated technical debate due to archaic infrastructure. As an outsider (non-web software developer), I have to say debates like these hint strongly (IMO) of a cargo cult technology culture surrounding web development. Of course I get that we have to work with existing infrastructure; however I must admit it's surprising so many people seem blind to the idea that maybe the issue shouldn't exist in the first place.

mixmastamyk 12y ago
It's not so easy to get thousands of players to turn on a dime. Especially when some don't care about your improvement at any particular time, see IE.

akerl_ 12y ago

For the opposite case: http://no-www.org/ http://no-www.org/

Kerrick 12y ago
And for the humorous case: http://www.www.extra-www.org http://www.www.extra-www.org
lucisferre 12y ago
Does that site actually make a case or do they just not like the "www" being there?
- ma2rten 12y ago
  Yes. By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the 'http://' http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.
  - justizin 12y ago
    that's great, mail servers have an MX record, rather than relying on an A record for the base domain to provide only one service, which can cause confusion with other services.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? You mean host. www is a host in example.com. Protocol indicator (http/https) and host name (www, mail, bob) have nothing to do with each other. You don't have to do @host.example.com if there is a special DNS record for SMTP to indicate where to actually send mail, without it you do have to do host.example.com. > automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80 What HTTP server? if the URL is www.example.com we connect to the server named www, it could be named bob if we wanted. Without the host name given you have to create a catchall to tell clients to send ALL traffic without a hostname to. The comparison between protocols is really stupid.

AhtiK 12y ago

Performance penalty is no longer an issue with AWS: CloudFront support for root domain/zone apex has been there since June 2013 [1]. DNSMadeEasy has ANAME for somewhat similar purpose [2]. It's worth noting that AWS CloudFront works ONLY with AWS Route 53 for the proper latency-based routing with root domains. Yes, DNSMadeEasy ANAME works with CloudFront too but it's not smart about returning the closest edge to the user. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/06/11/announcing-custom-ssl-certificates-and-zone-apex-support-for-cloudfront/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/06/11/announc... [2] http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/press-release/dns-made-easy-introduces-aname-records/ http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/press-release/dns-made-easy-intro...

tszming 12y ago
The issue with cookies mentioned in the article is still valid, which also affect performance.
- AhtiK 12y ago
  Yep, still valid, cookies are sent. But performance-wise if the cookie is just a session id then maybe sending a few hundred bytes extra with each resource request doesn't even show up in profiling. With cookies the number of connections opened remains the same, amount of bytes received remains the same. Most of the network time with a pageload is wasted on opening a connection for each resource and streaming the output, if there's a need to optimize then instead of getting rid of cookies it's better to concat resources etc or move to SPDY. OR, just buy that second domain for static content if client-side performance becomes that important and sending unneeded cookies feels like a waste :)
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    Odds are your client will send those cookies by some ethernet network, that'll pad every package into a minimum size much larger than the request anyway. And if you get a client that isn't using ethernet (maybe GSM, what is its minimum package size?), they'll probably use large TCP packets too, and pad at that level.

based2 12y ago

gionn 12y ago

old but gold.

d0ugie 12y ago

Perhaps fewer would avoid using naked domains if we hadn't settled on the visually widest and verbally longest to recite letter. Kudos, twitter.

kilovoltaire 12y ago

"Ironically powered by WordPress" is a nice touch.

pooper 12y ago
because wordpress.org doesn't use www?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
m52go 12y ago
not sure why you're getting voted down...i came here to say that same thing. it's kind of funny.

_greim_ 12y ago

No reason is given why you should use www. The only arguments presented here are a couple technical issues with having naked domains. But you could have w.example.com or foo.example.com and address those same problems.

notatoad 12y ago
you should use www because it is the convention, and no meaning is assigned to it. if you use w.example.com people will assume the w has some meaning, or try to read your domain as "wexample"
- _greim_ 12y ago
  If that's the only valid reason to use "www" (as opposed to "mmm" or anything else) then why wouldn't an article titled "Why use www?" mention it? It seems like people are just looking for ways to rationalize their preference for seeing "www" in URLs, so are latching onto any and every possible argument to justify that bias. There are a few valid considerations on both sides, but ultimately this strikes me as just the latest bit of churn in tech fashion.

excitom 12y ago

I dislike www since it is the world's worst acronym, having three times as many syllables as the words it replaces.

pling 12y ago
That's why, at least in the UK, we use "dub dub dub".
- grkvlt 12y ago
  Do we? The most common time-saving pronunciation I have heard simply uses the initial 'w' sounds from the three words, and therefore has three syllables.
  - pling 12y ago
    I've heard that but primarily with inexperienced users.
    - grkvlt 12y ago
      I just looked at the Wikipedia page for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_%22www%22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_%22www%22 and have never seen so much unsourced drivel in my life. For the record, I have been pronouncing it the way I described in the GP comment for the last twenty plus years, so that's some sort of data point.
      - pling 12y ago
        Well its Wikipedia. What do you expect. And as for me, it's purely an anecdote. I think it depends on where you are and who you know. Citation needed.
- jamespharaoh 12y ago
  err, no we don't, sorry!
- 12y ago

james33 12y ago

If your site has gotten "so big," are you really still going to be using Heroku?

bshimmin 12y ago
Rap Genius for one certainly did (may still do for all I know). Hosting anything serious on Heroku seems like craziness to me, but perhaps some people have identified uniquely good reasons to do it...

jpollock 12y ago

You use www for the same reason that the ftp server is ftp.X and the mail server is mail.X. This allows organisations to have logical service locations separate from their current configured location. So, www is your web service. If you'd like a proposal, add a new type of DNS record, like the MX record, specifically for HTTP.

shabble 12y ago
Isn't this what the SRV[1] record type is designed to solve generically? Getting adoption at the client end is likely the limiting factor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record
- mattstocum 12y ago
  Yes it is. For some reason supporting SRV for HTTP is too hard https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14328
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    For gods sake. Open since 1999!? This bug/request has been sitting since last century.
  - gioele 12y ago
    It looks like one of those bugs requesting a new feature that sits there for years until Chrome implements the same feature (in a Google-specific partial way). Only then Mozilla rushes to implement it, but at that point it is too late and Google takes all the merit for leading the web forward.
protonfish 12y ago
No, that is what the TCP port number is for.
- sethhochberg 12y ago

xyclos 12y ago

lost me at "webmasters", lol.

grkvlt 12y ago

Since the original TBL web server was at 'info.cern.ch' I think everyone has been Doing It Wrong since then, and we should replace 'www' with 'info' everywhere. I'm off to create 'info.not-www.org', I think...

shmerl 12y ago

> Why should I use www? You just shouldn't. It's a relic of the times when protocol was embedded in the URL to differentiate ftp from http or gopher.

skeletonjelly 12y ago
You didn't read the linked article did you

lnanek2 12y ago

This is a nice piece about engineering. However, it would be nice to see an A/B test for what the users prefer. The technical drawbacks don't seem large compared to, say, +1% better conversion rate for people seeing your URL in media and typing it into a browser.

wmeredith 12y ago
You could easily promote the naked domain and forward traffic from it to the www version of your site.

adrianmacneil 12y ago

I used to be strongly in the no-www camp for aesthetic reasons, but have since come around. There are legitimate reasons why having www (or any subdomain) is important in any large site. The CNAME argument is obsolete since most DNS providers support ALIAS records now. The static no-cookie argument doesn't really matter since you could always serve static content on a separate domain altogether (ex: fbcdn.net). However, if you want to run hosted services on subdomains, you run into an important security issue. For example, say you have Zendesk hosted on support.mysite.com. You don't want to leak session cookies from mysite.com to support.mysite.com. In most browsers, you can just specify the cookie domain and it will only be sent to the root domain. However, NO versions of IE respect this (even IE 10+) [1]. So your IE users will always leak session cookies to hosted services on subdomains. In any reasonably secure site, this is unacceptable (especially when you start using other hosted services for status.mysite.com, careers.mysite.com, etc etc). Unfortunately, this is pretty much impossible to work around, unless you want to ban IE users from using your site entirely. Solution: Just use www (or any other subdomain, if you want to be different) from the start, and save yourself the headache of migrating later. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2009/08/20/wininet-ie-cookie-internals-faq.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2009/08/20/winin...

ecesena 12y ago
What about internal services with subdomains? What if, for instance, you have myservice.mysite.com and you want to share cookies among www and myservice? I mean, would you recommend to set cookies with domain mysite.com and thus have a different domain for external services, like support.mysite.net, or...? (genuinely asking, I don't mean to criticize, sorry if the english is not perfect :)
- dlubarov 12y ago
  Exactly - if you have a combination of trusted and untrusted subdomains, like www.mysite.com support.mysite.com wordpress.mysite.com Then it's impossible to give only certain ones access to your session cookie. You could use *.secure.mysite.com for all internal apps, but that seems ugly. You could also not use subdomains for any internal apps, like Google, but that's limiting in other ways - notably, it makes it impossible to have any security isolation between internal apps.

endergen 12y ago

Cloudflare recently announced support for CNAME functionality from naked domains. See: 'Introducing CNAME Flattening: RFC-Compliant CNAMEs at a Domain's Root' http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-.... Obviously www. is extraneous if you can get the CNAME functionality.

derickis 12y ago
Straying off a bit, but I'm using this feature by CloudFlare on my personal site which is hosted on Github. The CNAME Flattening feature is awesome, and according to David Ensinger (http://davidensinger.com/2014/04/transferring-the-dns-from-namecheap-to-cloudflare-for-github-pages/ http://davidensinger.com/2014/04/transferring-the-dns-from-n...) there are a bunch of neat performance boosts too. My site: http://derick.is/ http://derick.is/
joeyespo 12y ago
DNSimple offers this too, but they call it an ALIAS record.

everydaypanos 12y ago

Still in no-www camp!

serf 12y ago
as long as the translation and redirection is done by the browser somewhat seamlessly (which modern browsers seem to have no problem with on correctly setup websites), I am too. Aesthetically 'www' has never been that pleasant looking.

everydaypanos 12y ago

Still in no-www camp!

kolev 12y ago

URLs without www look uglier to me. The www gives you a visual filler space between the cryptic http:// http:// and the domain, but, again, who cares about URLs nowadays? Also, www makes easy to parse out URLs in text. In addition, people will always try www even if your canonical domain is without it resulting possibly in a redundant redirect and/or dual versions of URL being in existence. Lastly, just like www, .com is here to stay. After so much investment in www and .com from advertising, education, etc., don't expect billions to switch away so easily.

qu4z-2 12y ago
Personally I find www. no less cryptic than http:// http://. Additionally http:// http:// is hidden in many browsers these days, so you're left with just {,www.}example.com/ and don't need the filler. Regarding "who cares about urls nowadays?", clearly the people in this thread making passionate arguments for and against a leading www. care :)
- kolev 12y ago
  I agree most people probably cannot decode WWW, but, as I said, years have been invested to educate the populace that a web address starts with www. and ends with .com. So, when you see www.hello.com, I don't need to put labels and stuff - people know this is an address. If I put "computer.systems", you won't know unless I label.

Thiz 12y ago

A better solution instead of www would be: web.example.com The way it should have been since day one.

mhartl 12y ago
MIT still uses it: $ curl -I mit.edu HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Server: AkamaiGHost Content-Length: 0 Location: http://web.mit.edu/ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 03:12:18 GMT Connection: keep-alive (It looks like they were a little sloppy, though; that should probably be a 301 instead of a 302.)
- skeletonjelly 12y ago
  That might be on purpose from Akamai?

seoguru 12y ago

http://yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html http://yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html "W" is a letter that is not one syllable, for that would be too few, a letter that is not two syllables, for that too would be too few, but a letter, in fact the one letter of all twenty-six that insists upon blathering on and on in its attempt to twist the tongue and overtax the ear, extending to the full three, yes three--three syllables, the legal alphabetical maximum. But wait, my friend. That is only the beginning. We go on to treble the damages by repeating this freak letter, this monstrosity that is one thing, claims to be two other things, but is really three things, not once, not twice, but a full three times, in a nonometric rhapsody fleshed out to the nines, a compound triplicate triumphant cat-o'-nine-tails tongue-lashing, a nonotuple witches' syllabic brew of treble, treble, toil and trouble. It is enough I say! Nine times enough, in fact. :-)

rasur 12y ago
In English, yes perhaps. Aber auf Deutsch, man sagt "vey vey vey". Them's the breaks one is dealt by one's language of choice. (I'm English, but in Switzerland, and have clearly noticed the ease of the alternative... ;) )
ianstormtaylor 12y ago
Not to mention the extra syllable for "dot".

adventured 12y ago

"You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big." Don't tell these little sites: stackoverflow.com, rapgenius.com, foursquare.com, twitter.com, instagram.com, ask.fm, wordpress.com, imgur.com, vimeo.com, hootsuite.com, github.com

mhartl 12y ago

It is possible to do 301 redirects at the registrar level in a way that preserves the full path, including query strings? This is, I'd like to arrange for example.com/home?a=foo&b=bar to redirect to www.example.com/home?a=foo&b=bar Is there any way to do this without using something more specific like mod_rewrite?

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
What's wrong with mod_rewrite?
- mhartl 12y ago
  It won't work at, e.g., Heroku.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    So? Your redirects don't need to be at Heroku.
    - mhartl 12y ago
      So what if my website is at Heroku?
      - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
        Well, why use Heroku for redirection? That sounds like overkill. Your registrar may provide web hosting, or possibly forwarding.
        mhartl 12y ago
        Your registrar may provide . . . forwarding. And thus we return to my original question: Is there a way to do forwarding at the registrar level in a way that preserves the rest of the URL structure? If you're willing to work at a less general level than the registrar, a Ruby gem called Refraction used to work for forwarding in Rails projects (I used it for the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and The Tau Manifesto), but Refraction rules included in a recent Rails project (the most recent iteration of http://tauday.com/ http://tauday.com/) were seemingly ignored. Some Googling revealed a couple of possible more up-to-date solutions: https://github.com/cwninja/rack-force_domain https://github.com/cwninja/rack-force_domain https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host I have yet to try them out, but they look promising. As an aside, when someone asks a question of the form "How do I do X without feature Y?", it's rarely helpful to respond with something like "Why not use Y?" Typically, the person asking the question has a reason for not using Y, and by making not using Y part of the question they're trying to avoid exactly the kind of digression that happened in this thread. EDIT (because HN won't let me reply): I agree that it's sometimes worth understanding why they want to do X without Y, but it's best done with a lightness of touch. Otherwise you risk not giving the asker the benefit of the doubt (e.g., via statements like "So? Your redirects don't need to be at Heroku."). It's usually better to either answer the original question as stated or tread very carefully, with phrasing like "I'd like to understand your reasons for not wanting to use Y" rather than the blunter "What's wrong with Y?" UPDATE: I can confirm that [rack-canonical-host](https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host https://github.com/tylerhunt/rack-canonical-host) does the kind of forwarding I wanted, as you can verify by visiting, e.g., http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar, which is correctly forwarded to http://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar http://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto?foo=bar.

digitalWestie 12y ago

This looks an appropriate use of my time.

cyphunk 12y ago

> You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big. nope, sorry. i have no desire for my sites to be big. i prefer rememberable to a few, over big. next. can someone tell me why these people are actually pushing www use? So far the reasons they state make no sense. It sound's like a bunch of grammar addicts getting into the technologist scene. > Twitter, for instance, which does not use www, had to buy new domain names just for static content. and, who cares? If you become a really "big" website I guess you can afford another domain name. > You may not run into any of these issues today, but as your web site grows, you eventually will. What I learned from this. When my site get's so big that I can sniff coke off of male escorts I should hire someone to deal with purchasing more domains for our cookie content issue. thanks, solved.

simonnreynolds 12y ago

I would argue that www. domains are easier and quicker to read, as the domain is located in the centre away from the leading /

hexleo 12y ago

In China, for some people if your web site doesn't use www, they will confused. I told him a domain name, he will add www before. orz

marcosscriven 12y ago

If only phonetically in English it weren't nine syllables:"dou-ble-u dou-ble-u dou-ble-u" I recall the first time hearing it in German - simply 'vay vay vay' - much easier!

PostOnce 12y ago
not sure how many people actually say this but i saw a TV ad that said dub dub dub dot siteurlhere dot com it may not be correct but its understandable in context

mellisarob 12y ago

i kind of lovev 'www'

joeyespo 12y ago

> You should use www because today you have a small web site, and tomorrow you want a big web site. Really big. Isn't this pre-optimizing? You can use naked domains today and redirect tomorrow when it becomes an issue (IF it's still a technical issue we need to worry about at that time). 301 is built for this. Or, when you do become big, this becomes a tiny issues. > Twitter, for instance, which does not use www, had to buy new domain names just for static content. Do you think Twitter struggled to afford this in any way? > You may not run into any of these issues today, but as your web site grows, you eventually will. Again, a big company can easily afford this. Do things that don't scale. Worrying about www should not be your initial concern.