Expert: Scottgem - 1/17/2005

Question
Hi,

Bit of a basic question, Ive noticed that some sites on the web have no 'www.' in their web address eg the address reads;

http://(name of company).com

What does this mean? Are they not on the world wide web? Where are they located if they are no on the web? Is it safe to buy from an online company if they don't have 'www.' in their address?

Many thanks,

Luke

Answer
When the WEB was first designed. URLs had the WWW to distinguish themselves as World Wide Web addresses. But has the WEB became more prevalent and URLs were instantly recognized as being on the WEB, then became superfluous. The way the system works, there are Domain Name Servers (DNS) located all over the Internet. These get their info from about a dozen root servers maintained by official Domain registrars. When you enter a URL in a browser, the browser send the URL to a DNS to get back the actual IP address of the server. So, essentially it doesn't matter what the URL is, as long as there is a matching entry in the DNS. I beleive companies may pay extra for non-standard URLS, but I'm not sure about that.

There is no issue about trusting a URL that starts with www or not. There is no difference.

HTH
Scott<>