Typing www.?

**Timbuk2**

I'm sorry if I posted this is the wrong forum - after reading about 5 charters I'm still baffled as to which forum this post is most suitable to.

What difference does typing www. make to your browser accessing an address?

For example - if I type http://www.boards.ie or http://boards.ie, it makes no difference.
However, if I type http://met.ie, I get an OpenDNS search page (link), but if I type http://www.met.ie, it loads perfectly. (The same applies for http://postbank.ie)
Interestingly, if I go to http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com and type in www.met.ie, it says it is working, but if I type in met.ie it says that it is down.

What is the explanation behind this? I always thought not typing www. doesn't make any difference, but it seems to.

biko

www.something.com can be a different page to just something.com.

something.com can have several interfaces:
mail.something.com
ftp.something.com
www.something.com

www is a way of telling you, the user, that this is the address to use to see the webpage

It's common to redirect a request to something.com to www.something.com so you can still see the webpage but to the computer www.something.com and something.com are different addresses.

Did that make sense?

Liam Byrne

Also depends on the browser; some of them auto-prefix the "www" if it's missing....

smemon

Most owners will re-direct the non-www to the www version (or vice versa) for SEO purposes.

Search engines can see both as separate sites otherwise which can cause confusion.. so too can tracking tools...

Also, most people are lazy and won't bother typing in www... so you should redirect them to it :P

Seth Brundle

As an example of this, for a long time many companys advertised whatever.com yet this didn't work (you got a blank screen or whatever) - you had to go to www.whatever.com. IIRC, this applied to vodafone.ie for a long while.

**Timbuk2**

Thank you for all the helpful replies answering my trivial question!

They all answered my question excellently!

Epic Tissue

I hate websites that require the www.! Meteor being one of them >:(

Euro_Kraut

http://meteor.ie/

Epic Tissue

Euro_Kraut wrote: »

http://meteor.ie/

Oops, I meant http://mymeteor.ie

Edit: Seems like I should just go to meteor.ie anyway since you can log in there...

chakotha

Not too sure about Windows hosts but AFAIK on Linux/Apache what is included or omitted in the Apache configuration file can determine this. eg. on my shared server I have a domain set up as

<VirtualHost mysite.com www.mysite.com>
ServerName mysite.com
DocumentRoot /www/htdocs/mysite/
CustomLog /www/logs/mysite-access_log combined
ErrorLog /www/logs/mysite-error_log
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</VirtualHost>

If I take www.mysite.com out of the line

<VirtualHost mysite.com www.mysite.com>

then www.mysite.com no longer goes to the site.