Be a pro, do not require the www prefix in your domain name!

Written by Jon Berg <jon.berg|a|turtlemeat.com>

Introduction
Some webpages actually requires you to type www.somedomain.com . When some websites advertising on radio or tv they spend a lot of time reading the address, and then including the www when they are reading it. This is just plain ignorance.

Why www in the first place
Machines that are part of a domain, gets subnames under that domain. Example machine1.domain.com machine2.domain.com. In the early days of the Internet the people that connected to the Internet was majority big corporations, or educational institutions because of the high cost. These wanted to run many services, and had many computers that where visible out on the Internet. These services could be mail, news, ftp, gopher, databases, web, nameservers. They adapted a practice to name these mail.domain.com news.domain.com, ftp.domain.com and so on. Then it would be very easy to find the service you wanted. The webserver would be found on www.

Unless your organization is really big, you most likely can run all these services on one machine. Then it makes no sense to use all these subnames, just type in domain.com and you will get it. On the other hand for a big university on a domain name, it can be useful to distribute the load on different machines, so one machine handles ftp, another handles mail, another handles web traffic. This must be done because one machine would be overloaded to do all these tasks.

Fast forward to the present Internet
Web is the killer application of the Internet today. Domain name prices have gone seriously down, and everybody can register a lot of domain names if they want. A lot of people incorporate the domain name as a part of the branding of their website. Domain names are useful because it makes it easy to remember a website. You are only going to use the domain name for the website. You do not want to run a lot of news servers or mail servers, your ISP provides you with that or you can run it on your intranet.

If you use a domain name primarily for web there is no use for using a subname www. The primary use of the www.-consept is as said to load distribute different services across different machines in a big organization when you can not run all services on one machine. When it comes to load balancing web traffic it can be done, in different ways. You do not require to change the domain name or use many different subdomains. You can load balance web traffic to the top domain. Like google.com, it is not one machine. Anyway most websites do not get enough traffic to bring up load balancing.

Todo list
You should make sure your website can be accessed with only domain.com .
You should market your website and links pointing to it with only domain.com , not www.domain.com .
You should make sure you have an alias www. alias set up incase someone types in www.domain.com . (Someone that do not get it yet.)
Always skip the "www" when you are accessing other webpages, this will point out amateurs when they have a website can not be reached in a proper manner.

Following these rules will make you look like a pro, not a moron when you are talking about your website that is wwwwww dot blablabla dot com, but blabla dot com.

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