Customers can't connect to site unless they add WWW to address..

[ColKurtz]

My company has a website -- let's call it widgets.com. Instead of structuring one of our support areas like http://widgets.com/support, they put it in the domain name -- support.widgets.com. When I tell a customer to go to www.support.widgets.com, most drop the WWW and just type http://support.widgets.com. But without the WWW the address doesn't resolve.

Is this just the case of my company only registering the address with the WWW, and not registering the one without the WWW? I thought internet routing protocols ignored the www these days. Is that just for the primary domain name?

 

[thirtythree]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz
Is this just the case of my company only registering the address with the WWW, and not registering the one without the WWW?

I don't know the answers to your other questions, but you don't register the www and non-www separately. It sounds like an issue with your host/name server. Is the site hosted locally or through a third party?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz
My company has a website -- let's call it widgets.com. Instead of structuring one of our support areas like http://widgets.com/support, they put it in the domain name -- support.widgets.com. When I tell a customer to go to www.support.widgets.com, most drop the WWW and just type http://support.widgets.com. But without the WWW the address doesn't resolve.

Is this just the case of my company only registering the address with the WWW, and not registering the one without the WWW? I thought internet routing protocols ignored the www these days. Is that just for the primary domain name?

You don't have a DNS record for support.widgets.com. That's all you need.

Also, routing protocols have nothing to do with DNS whatsoever.

You always need a record for any address/url. The reason why widgets.com works without a www is because you have a DNS address record for widgets.com.

And for the love of god always do both - A record for www and CNAME record for the domain.

 

[kevnich2]

Exactly what spidey said. support is actually a subdomain of widgets.com and www. is a subdomain of the subdomain of widgets.com So you need a cname for www. which points to support.widgets.com (I would hope you also have a cname for www for www.widgets.com tha tpoints to widgets.com and then an actual host record that points to the IP of the server) Nothing should or will ever drop the www off simply because that's a subdomain and thus needs setup properly in DNS.

 

[TheSiege]

i work at a hosting company, and this happens all the time, www.domain.com goes one place and domain.com goes to another, sometimes the apache conf file is messed.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: TheSiege
i work at a hosting company, and this happens all the time, www.domain.com goes one place and domain.com goes to another, sometimes the apache conf file is messed.

If the host isn't registered in DNS it doesn't matter how the apache conf file looks.