03-20-2009, 02:22 PM
If the member provides you with a web address of www.example.com and you print example.com instead as their web address, then you have an error or typo in your directory. While it may be a good guess that the company happens to serve up the web page using either name, it is not appropriate that you mistype the address provided.
www.example.com
example.com
boogyman.example.com
are all completely independent of each other and could serve up different websites on different computers.
If the zone file in the DNS record happens to point to the same computer for all three addresses, the web server software itself can still serve up completely different sites depending on the name.
If the zone file points to the same computer and the server serves up the same website files, the website files themselves can serve up different websites depending on the name used to access them (I do this on one of my sites as a poor man's version of a virtual server).
And just because the site happens to work using example.com instead of www.example.com now, it doesn't guarantee that it will continue to do so in the future. One of the reasons why a subdomain (e.g. www) is completely independent is to let you spread the load to a different computer.
For example
apple.com
store.apple.com
support.apple.com
developer.apple.com
Are independent of each other both for administrative and performance reasons.
www.example.com
example.com
boogyman.example.com
are all completely independent of each other and could serve up different websites on different computers.
If the zone file in the DNS record happens to point to the same computer for all three addresses, the web server software itself can still serve up completely different sites depending on the name.
If the zone file points to the same computer and the server serves up the same website files, the website files themselves can serve up different websites depending on the name used to access them (I do this on one of my sites as a poor man's version of a virtual server).
And just because the site happens to work using example.com instead of www.example.com now, it doesn't guarantee that it will continue to do so in the future. One of the reasons why a subdomain (e.g. www) is completely independent is to let you spread the load to a different computer.
For example
apple.com
store.apple.com
support.apple.com
developer.apple.com
Are independent of each other both for administrative and performance reasons.