Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?
www was never necessary. It was used to distinguish other connection methods for the user(imagine ftp://, mail://, gopher://, etc) but you could always choose to route your domain(and any subdomain) to your web server. It remained part of marketing because it was what people expected. People kept using it in communication because they thought it was required.
ww1. or wwtubulartitty. could be routed to any web directory/page, sometimes maintainers will use ww1/ww2/etc to show that it’s routing to an alternate version of the site(like language, location, etc.).
If you visit a site that only works with www. and not without, it’s almost always because the person setting up the server screwed up.
No, it was to distinguish your web server hostname from your other service host. For example, “www.google.com” is (possibly) a different A/AAAA record than “smtp.google.com” And google.com is the domain those hosts are in, for their forward lookup.
For record, in-addr.arpa. has all the IPv4 and ip6.arpa. has all the IPv6 reverse lookup records.
It is superfluous information as a browser address. For a browser address there is a default intention of accessing web pages.
Yes, this is the correct answer
https://hackaday.com/2025/05/05/what-happened-to-www/
Though, until load balancers/reverse proxies came onto the scene, separating web traffic to a separate host may have been wise. But then again, that was also when it was more textual and dialup was common.
It sort of matches the cadence of;
“CALL, 1-800… BLA BLA BLA… BLA-BLA BLA-BLA.”
“Visit, www… DOT… BLA-BLA DOT-COM”
giving the audience a familiar auditory signal to pay closer attention to the next bit.
Exactly. “Go to my house dot Com” would probably trip some people up because they weren’t expecting to be given a website name by audio, instead initially thinking they should go to my house, then being unsure if they missed prior info. Now, it’s the default. For a similar cue reason, I still say things like “Vin number” if I’m trying to be clear as possible, particularly by phone. “can you give me the Vin” is sometimes misunderstood or misheard because “Vin” is a very mumbly word. “Vin number” gives an obvious retroactive explanation.
Humans use context in audio constantly and have to work backwards often to find the full meaning. It’s just natural and smoothpy accomplished. If you’ve ever said “what” and then answered the question when it was being asked the second time, you worked backwards and figured it out
dotslashdotdashdotslashdotdash dotcom
dot com
I’ve also never used it for my own domains. 4 characters less is a win.
It was necessary to access many websites, unless the people running the site made an alias/redirect. Which yes, usually they did. But I definitely ran into cases where that didn’t happen and I worked on websites where it didn’t. Was rarely/almost never my decision on how that was set up. But yes from a tech perspective no one ever had to use that subdomain.Some websites were setup in a way that made it necessary to type. Apparently what I wrote above was somehow controversial.
It was not. Sysops would choose to have port 80 land on www. but every server daemon like Apache would honor the hostname set by the maintainer, regardless of what subdomain was being called. Never was there a routing method that just looked at the subdomain to determine what to do with the request. Maintainers could choose to require a particular subdomain and prebuilt server packages/management systems offered it as a convenience but it was never mandatory.
The domain routing at the registrar would be where you would translate the name into an IP and your server would determine what to do with the request based on the port and request type. At no time during this process was www. subdomain necessary to point it to your web server daemon.
You seem to be mixing the fact that many server providers wouldn’t offer you a chance to change it but that doesn’t mean it was necessary to route a web request. It was just a shitty offering by the provider.
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You made yourself very clear. The people that set up your servers didn’t offer you the option and you’re trying to tell the community that www. was necessary because of that.
/flex.
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If my mom made me say a prayer before I ate, that doesn’t mean you have to pray to make food go in your mouth. YOUR HOST CHOSE TO SET UP YOUR SERVER THAT WAY. IT WAS NEVER NECESSARY FOR YOUR WEBSITE TO WORK, IT WAS A DECISION YOUR HOST MADE. Let me know if this is still too verbose for you.
I was clear, I’m not the problem here.