This is a copy of a conversation I have repeatedly. I just need to clean it up and expand upon it a bit. -- AdamShand
> I don't buy it. At least not yet. When you migrate the web service to another box, you just leave behind a web redirect that pushes the web client from whatever example.com resolved to over to newebitch.example.com, or you change your DNS so that example.com and newebitch.example.com resolve to the same IP.
Yay, now I have to run apache on two different boxes. Yay, now I have two points of failure for some percentage of my web requests.
> The whole point is that "http://example.com" is asking the domain name owner for whatever web site should be associated with example.com, and the admin can point them whereever they like. It's annoying to the web vistor to have to guess whether you put your web service on www.example.com or web.example.com or something even more arcane.
If domain.com and www.domain.com are synonomous then sure, you can make that assumption. But some people expect that to be the pop/imap server not the web server. Some people expect it to be the ftp server. If irc is your game then shouldn't domain.com be the main IRC server (say freenode.net instead of irc.freenode.net).
The A record for domain.com can only point to *one* thing, and you'll never get user concensus on what that one thing should be.
> http://mydomin.com and http://www.mydomin.com hit the same web pages, and my admin has never complained to me about it. And believe me, he's more than willing to complain about things
Probably because he runs a small corporate network, and has never maintained a large enterprise or service provider network.
> So I don't get it: why is this hard on the admin? Because it is a heck of a lot easier on the user.
In my experience http://www.domain.com nearly always works, even if it's just a redirect. In the very few exceptions when it doesn't work http://domain.com does. That doesn't seem onerous to me.
Further the only reason this is even confusing is people bitch about this non-problem. If admin's just did it the "right way" there wouldn't even be this minor end-user confusion.