Why does deleting "www." work?

[Mike Feury]

Hi All,

Handy trick if you get a "page not found" error is to delete the "www." from the URL in your address bar and hit <enter> - it often brings up the page.

I've used this trick for years, but I have no idea why it works when it does - anyone know?

Thanks

[tthurgo]

Well, in general, when people set up a webserver, they point http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com to the same local directory on the webserver.

However, sometimes they forget to setup the "www", or they point the http://www.domain.com to (e.g.) /home/web/www and the other (http://domain.com) to /home/web/domain.com, which means that there are virtually two webservers running instead of one with an alias (DNS a-record). Means, they are treated as two seperate webs, which also means, one file, available on the 1st webserver, is not available on the other.

Bottom line is: System administrators are often lazy (no offense anyone). What you found is not really a tweak.

Tom

[Mike Feury]

Makes perfect sense - laziness I can always understand

Saw this motto somewhere:
"Hard work pays off later. Laziness pays off now!"

[Nate]

Another possibility is that your connection isn't the greatest and for some reason you don't connect on the first try. I get that in spirts on the college LAN where it will tell me that the server cannot be contacted but all I do is hit "Reload" and everything works fine. Dumb networks!

Nate