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!rant

I've seen some rants about people complaining about websites using the 'www' subdomain, so I'd like to take this opportunity to try to explain my opinion about why sites might use it.

I use to feel the same way about not having the www subdomain. It felt like an outdated standard that serves no purpose. But I have changed my option...

Sometimes certain servers have other services running other than just the website, such as ssh, ftp, sql, etc., running on different ports. What if you want to use a web proxy and caching service similar to cloudflare or a cdn? We'll you can't, because they won't allow traffic to flow through to your other ports.

That's where the www subdomain comes in. Enable your caching and cdn on your www subdomain, and slap a 301 redirect from your primary domain on port 80 or 443 to the www subdomain. This still allows you to access your other services via the domain name while still gaining the benefits of using a cdn.

Now I know you could use an 'ftp' subdomain or the like, but to each their own in that regard.

Comments
  • 0
    Inspiration for this post provided by:
    https://devrant.com/rants/1657756/
  • 1
    If you want a cdn then use cdn.subdomain.com
    Www doesnt have any advantage over anything else, using www for something that doesnt point to your site is confusing for people.
  • 0
    Now, the cloudflare use case does make sense..
  • 1
    @xewl no it doesnt? Subdomains and ports dont have anything to do with eachother...
  • 0
    @Codex404 IP assignment (proxying requests) to that domain, does?
  • 1
    @xewl I dont see how the subdomain should effect the use of cloadflare?

    If I want I could point it to abrakadabraelakazam.someDomain.com

    It should not matter
  • 0
    @Codex404 to some regard. It wouldn't really be a decent DDOS protection if the actual IP is still visible in the DNS records, even with a redirect. ( anyhoooow... w/e :') )
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