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?
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.