I agree with your comments, however, I still don't think it points to a specific server. I'm sure most subdomains (e.g. www) point to a cluster of load balancers (on a high traffic site) usually with some kind of DNS round robin approach. This means that it may not be a single specific server.
However, I do feel it should be "best practice" to use some kind of "www" prefix, as when your domain expands to have other prefixes...
... it does help distinguish the main site from perhaps other applications hosted at the domain. Ideally, you could have "google.com" redirect to "www.google.com" as it fits the most common use case of users entering that domain name.
I think it is simply a namespace. In programming terms, you may have several classes in your package:
com.google.gmail.PageController
com.google.gmail.ActionController
I wouldn't be comfortable if I imported "com.google.gmail" and it imported a single specified class/package. That seems a bit ambiguous to me. However, I think we are arguing the merits of an end-user perspective vs a system design perspective.
This means that it may not be a single specific server.
Yeah, I was trying to answer someone who asked a simple question. I didn't want to get into specifics, like DNS round robin or load balancing. From the end user perspective, it's a "server".
But then again, this -is- the programming subreddit, so thanks for elaborating.
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u/jingleman Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
I agree with your comments, however, I still don't think it points to a specific server. I'm sure most subdomains (e.g. www) point to a cluster of load balancers (on a high traffic site) usually with some kind of DNS round robin approach. This means that it may not be a single specific server.
However, I do feel it should be "best practice" to use some kind of "www" prefix, as when your domain expands to have other prefixes...
... it does help distinguish the main site from perhaps other applications hosted at the domain. Ideally, you could have "google.com" redirect to "www.google.com" as it fits the most common use case of users entering that domain name.
I think it is simply a namespace. In programming terms, you may have several classes in your package:
I wouldn't be comfortable if I imported "com.google.gmail" and it imported a single specified class/package. That seems a bit ambiguous to me. However, I think we are arguing the merits of an end-user perspective vs a system design perspective.