Why www

A name server translates a name to an IP address. If so, your name server connects to the name server for howstuffworks. If the HowStuffWorks name server has a listing for the www prefix, it returns the IP address for "www. The network administrator for the domain "howstuffworks. On smaller sites, the same machine can handle everything. When using a provider such as Heroku or Akamai to host your web site, the provider wants to be able to update DNS records in case it needs to redirect traffic from a failing server to a healthy server.

This is only an issue if your site gets large enough to require highly redundant hosting with such a service. In order to not use www, you will have to run your own server farms and you will be unable to use such services to their fullest extent. Another reason has to do with cookies. One common web site optimization is to serve static content from a subdomain, such as static. Does your web address require "www" or not? While most web servers redirect to the correct URL, some don't.

Just remove "www" and avoid the confusion altogether. It causes bounced emails. Some people that are not especially tech savvy think they need to include "www" in email addresses because they saw the prefix on the website.

The resulting bounced emails could be avoided by avoiding "www" in the first place. It creates inconsistent branding. If you have a dot com domain name and you include ". Jakob Borg Jakob Borg 1, 1 1 gold badge 10 10 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. It's not too late to change. The way that SRV records are specified to be used, after all, is to fall back to the old i. The shameful truth is that in fact there is no reason for not bringing WWW browsers into the 21st century.

All of the technical issues were solved years ago. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related 0. Hot Network Questions. Server Fault works best with JavaScript enabled. Accept all cookies Customize settings.