URL's with/without the www.

That has to do largely with the configuration of the web host. Most hosts will allow both with and without the www, but some, for some reason, only offer it one way. Hope this helps.

Brian

Yeppers that helped. Thanks Brian.

thah is very odd. I have never typed www when typing in a addy into the address bar. And I don't think I've had problems with any coming up.

Unless you do an A RECORD of * for your domain, you HAVE TO add an A RECORD for "www" otherwise it will not work. The reason you (Jackson992) never have had any problems is because when you add a domain to a DNS server, you add it without www and then you can add www or mail or * (* = wildcard).

Just type whatever.com into your address bar and hold Ctrl while you hit Enter and it'll fill the "www" and ".com" in for you. So you don't have to worry about the beginning of it as long as it's a .com.

Quote: Originally posted by mjames
Just type whatever.com into your address bar and hold Ctrl while you hit Enter and it'll fill the "www" and ".com" in for you. So you don't have to worry about the beginning of it as long as it's a .com.

Well I'll be darned! Learn something new every day.

Thanks Marc

That's IE-only. Opera 6 adds (prepends?) just "http://" and Netscape doesn't do anything.

It is odd that even some large companies don't get it.
Try this URL http://adobe.com .

Is the www necessary?

Yes, there may be reasons for this, but they balance any benefits against lost customers who only type domain.com and move on. For a large company like adobe, a couple customers lost may not mean much -- or they will know to go back and type in the www. But for a smaller site, where the customer does not what they want specifically already in mind, this is not recommended... because a customer could type in domain.com, get an error and assume that the site doesn't work, then moving on to the competitor.

I think as Brian mentioned that most visitors will figure out that they need a www in their address but why. Why cause your visitors even the slightest inconvenience like this when it is so easy to setup.

Having a * or www A RECORD isn't always the complete solution. It also can depend on whether the company is using NameVirtualHost vs just straight IP VirtualHost. With IP based, a * A RECORD should resolve everything prepended to a domain name.

However, if using NameVirtualHost and if more than one domain is running on an IP address, a ServerAlias needs to be added to your sever config or it will not resolve. If your ServerName is domain.com, then you also need a ServerAlias domain.com

'
Like was said, they either don't care or maybe they don't know. Have run into a few sysadmins out there that I know more than they do and that is not saying much for them. I discovered the ServerAlias thing after a couple hours or beating my head against my desktop.

I find this annoying as on my http://accursed.co.uk you can only choose one or the other.
That's 34sp.com for you. I'm going to get another host soon anyway

That's not good at all. I know many people (mainly newbies) that think domains must have "www." infront of them in order to worka nd the more advanced users will probably not write the "www." since they know most sites don't need it.

When I first got my domain the www didn't work, actually it DID work, but forwarded you to someone else's site entirely. My host blamed the registrar, and the registrar blamed the host. So eventually I just gave up and always made sure I put in the http:// when I provide my domain name, so people wouldn't mistakenly throw in the www themselves as well and get taken to this very ugly site that had nothing to do with me.

These days, with a different host, it all works perfectly, but it was very weird for a while there.

Just throwing in my 2 cents
-Kristen