jdMorgan - 1:30 am on Jan 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

example.com -- corporate intranet server
www.example.com -- world-wide-web server
dev.example.com -- a development server
test.example.com -- a pre-release testing server
mail.example.com -- the mail server

None of these hosts are necessarily the same machine; Requesting each of them results in content from entirely different "Web sites" being displayed, and therefore "www" is not insignificant in this content. It's all well and good to get indignant about "www", but before doing so, it's a good idea to understand what it means, what it is for, and why it exists.

If all hosting companies redirected www to non-www, there would be an awful lot of lawsuits. The same would be true if they unilaterally redirected *any* subdomain to any other subdomain or hostname.

Non-www is good because it is short and concise. It may have a bit more perceived "authority" if used for an established brand. Make sure you are a Nike or a Coca-Cola before considering yourself to be an established brand -- cheap-blue-widgets.com may not cut it.

In printed media, www is good because it provides a visual cue that the text at hand is a web address -- and www.example.com certainly looks better than http://example.com in print. This is also true for radio, where it cues the listener to the start of the impending domain name announcement.

Using www was also the 'standard' way of indicating an internet server as opposed to a corporate intranet server for many years. As indicated in a post above, it is to some extent still "expected."

Now that computer hardware has advanced and it is no longer always necessary to use separate physical hosts for internet, intranet, development, test, and mail servers, choosing www-versus-non-www is largely a matter of the branding and marketing factors mentioned above. But www existed (and exists) for a very good reason, and that is that it is a legitimate subdomain name just like any other -- no more, no less. Even with powerful modern servers, an informed choice still has to consider branding, type-ins, media presentation, and other marketing factors, not just personal preferences.

As a result, there is no single "correct" answer.

Jim