WWW. Why. Why. Why.
The www prefix is redundant. Technically, and now, given the ubiquitous nature of the web, in marketing as well. So why do companies insist on retaining it. Worse, why do some companies have URLs that only work with the www.? This is sloppy, a couple of lines of code would direct either company.com or www.company.com to the correct IP address. There are some big names who suffer from this sloppiness. Will ’07 be the year that WWW, an acronym that takes longer to say than to write, drifts into history?
But you assume that the company’s domain is used only for their web server. Often a company’s web server (www.company.com), mail server (mail.company.com), ftp server (ftp.company.com), nameserver (dns.company.com) and other servers are on separate machines.
What you are proposing that they alias their main domain root to point to their web server.
As an aside: this would be more appropriately done by changing their bind config than by writing “a few lines of code”.
yes, this is handled by the zone file for he domain (which DNS servers use). BUT, if the web server config is not set up correctly, it can lead to errors. usually you add a host header for domain.com as well as http://www.domain.com to the site config if you are using virtual hosts.
I responded to Patrick’s post at http://www.thekua.com/atwork/?p=9#comment-75
I mention it here because you linked to this post in your comment on his post :p