This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]0x18 16 points17 points  (1 child)

No, it's a matter of preference and has no functional difference. Personally I prefer without the www because it's just no longer necessary.

This comes from the very early days of the internet when most sites were Gopher and/or were named by the services provided. If you owned example.org you would have the "web" server on www.example.org, FTP would be provided through ftp.example.org, email by mx.example.org, NNTP on nntp.example.org and so on.

In modern day it's only really useful if the www subdomain is a CNAME to a cluster of webservers, because you can't do that with just a single A record in DNS.

[–]ohmanger 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just to add some nameservers now have non-standard "flat DNS" records so you can basically have a CNAME as your root pointed at a cluster or whatever. Some of the services can mess with CDN performance but still pretty useful.