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sorry but that

   Remove 'www' subdomain
is just harmful. force 'www.' instead. why? shitty URL parsers, marketing people and DDOS attacks, that's why.

let's imagine you write a

  - blog post
  - blog comment
  - press release (distributed via free and paid press release services)
  - mail
  - word
  - forum post
  - ...
  - ...
if you have a non-www URL it's a game of chance, your in text "whatever.tld" domain will get transformed into a clickable link. yes, a lot of modern URL parses will transform whatever.com into a clickable link, some will even transform whatever.in into a useable link, but a lot of old, shitty, idiotic, strange URL parsers won't. and well, a big part of the web, i would say most of it, is not up to date. so using non WWW will lead to a loss of inlinks and to a poor user experience of users who want to reach your site, but can't click on the in-text-domain (they need to copy/paste instead)

and the situation will get worse with the new commercial TLDs to come.

yes, you can - in most cases - force a domain to link conversion in most CMS if you write http:// in front of it. but well, in a promo text most marketing/pr people will not write "and http://whatever.tld has a new feature to give people endless bliss" they will write "whatever.tld has a new ....".

oh, and by the way. whenever a journalist will write a piece about you, in print or online, they will always (or at least in a lot of cases) write www in front of your domain anyway. yeah, that's not an issue if you have redirects in place, just annoying if you have an non-www webproperty.

plus

having a subdomain is another layer of defenses agains DDOS attacks. see this discussion on hacker news from may 18 2011 (my birthday by the way) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2575266

go for www.




And yet, I find no-www so much cleaner. With 301s it's generally not a problem, and link parsers will look for the protocol anyway. I think the only valid point is mitigating DDOS attacks, but I don't know enough about that subject to comment.


but in marketing, as in mails and comments, you or your loyal users do not always write http:// in front of your domain.

i consulted a sh-tload of companies on this question (and yes, i also think i have better things to do), any company that chooses non-www URLs regrets it down the road.


301 redirects.


does solve only the annoyance part (wrong www URLs by journalists), not the shitty URL parser & marketing people and DDOS issues.




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