url with/without the www

dinneenp

Hi,
My photoblog is http://photoblog.ie
I'm in the process of verifying with Google that I'm the owner of it.
*there's no such thing as a stupid question* but
does it matter which url I use?
http://photoblog.ie
or
http://www.photoblog.ie
Both point to my site. If I register one presume I don't need to register the other?
what is the point of the www then if I don't need to use it? Why would anyone type www all the time?(I know it's an abbreviation for world wide web) (also probably the only abbreviation that takes longer to say then the full words)
thanks,
Pa.

seamus

If you do a little reading on DNS and the diffference between domains and hosts.

A domain effectively describes an organisation with a network of machines. So in your case "photoblog.ie" is the name of the domain. It's doesn't matter whether or not you have 1 server or ten million.

In order for DNS to function properly, each machine in your domain should have a distinct name. So for example, your personal computer, you could call "Joe". In DNS then, the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) of your computer is joe.photoblog.ie. A DNS request against joe.photoblog.ie would return the IP Address of your computer.

DNS is older then the Internet. About ten years older. So when the internet first came about, domain owners needed a way to identify their web server so that others could use DNS to access it. It became the de facto standard to call your organisation's web server "www", hence the FQDN of the web server in the organisation became www.domain.com.

In more recent times, particularly with smaller sites, your domain is simply your web presence, and any "network" of computers you have is not accessible via the internet, so the only server in your domain *is* your webserver.

In this case, you specify a wildcard catch-all which redirects any unknown hostnames to "www". So "photoblog.ie" redirects to "www.photoblog.ie" as does "blah.photoblog.ie" or "reallyrandomlonghostname.photoblog.ie". It's considered more-or-less the norm now to refer to your website as "domain.com" instead of "hostname.domain.com" unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.

If you're planning on using Google for services (like mail), then they will ask you to verify that you own the domain photoblog.ie.

Sparks

You'll probably have to have two A-records in your DNS for that though; both for "*.photoblog.ie" and for "photoblog.ie".

mneylon

the simplest thing is to have domain.tld and www.domain.tld as A records - most hosts would do that as standard anyway

Then if it's on Linux with Apache throw in a rewrite rules to rewrite any requests for www.domain.tld to domain.tld

I'd avoid the "*", as that would mean that every possible record under the domain would be seen as being valid which is probably overkill