In today’s world most web sites do not need the www in front of the domain name. There was a point in history that this was necessary, but this should no longer be the case. To fully understand we need to understand a little of the history of DNS.
When the internet first started web servers were located on corporate networks. When designing a network it was very common to put each service (web, ftp, mail, etc) on separate servers. At that point it was common for the domain name itself to point directly at the company and then they could create different subnetworks for each of the services. An example of this would be smtp.domain.com, ftp.domain.com, and www.domain.com. Each of these would point to a different server on the network which allowed for the segmentation.
As time has moved on many of these services have moved onto the same hardware and yet the old domain name format has stood in place. Today almost every web site out there will work on www.domain.com as well as just domain.com, the www is just a mirror of domain.com. For the most part there is no reason to use the www version. Yet, most non-technical sites still use the www in advertising and some even set their sites to only function with the www version. I’ve seen it several times where when you go to the non-www version and it redirects to the www. In reality it should work the other way around.
At this point the only thing that the www on a domain does is makes it longer. Most non-geeks still say a web site as W W W dot domain dot com. If we get rid of the www it will not only save time, but money as well. Think of the ink you can save on publications by not using the www.
Using the www in a domain is redundant at this point in time. I urge all webmasters and system admins to remove the www from their domain whenever possible.
