# Bonehead stupid Internet question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 15, 2006, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338 "2006-12-15T21:43:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Plynck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Plynck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plynck)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2006, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/1 "2006-12-15T21:43:20Z")
Why do some internet sites have www at the beginning of their URL ([http://www.website.com](http://www.website.com)), while others (such as this one) skip the www ([http://website.com](http://website.com)) ? I know what the letters stand for, but I’m curious why they are required in some cases, and not in others. ---
**Author:** ![groman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/73ab20/32.png) [@groman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groman)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2006, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/2 "2006-12-15T21:49:50Z")
The way the domain name system is organized is roughly hierarchical. “.com” is what is known as a TLD (Top Level Domain). Top-level domain names are managed by an organization called ICANN. The authority controlling any particular domain name has control over the issuance of secondary domain names below it. So ‘[somesite.com](http://somesite.com)’ would have to be registered with whatever company controls the .com domain (Which is VeriSign I believe). So ICANN gave VeriSign rights to .com and InterNic gives the registrees rights to [somesite.com](http://somesite.com). The person who registers [somesite.com](http://somesite.com) has further authority over anything below that domain, for example [blah.somesite.com](http://blah.somesite.com), [blah.blah.somesite.com](http://blah.blah.somesite.com), etc. “www” is not particularly special, it’s just a convention (almost, I believe it might be mentioned in some RFC spec document). A lot of server administrators choose to restrict http web access to [www.somesite.com](http://www.somesite.com) and have [somesite.com](http://somesite.com) resolve to a different address that might not have a website. ---
**Author:** ![groman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/73ab20/32.png) [@groman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groman)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2006, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/3 "2006-12-15T21:54:51Z")
That “InterNic” should be VeriSign. Not that makes my post any more coherent, sorry. 😕 ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2006, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/4 "2006-12-15T21:55:58Z")
Ignored convention. Back in the day, (when the web was small, and there were no search engines indexing the internet) to make thing easy to remember, you provided a server name based on the protocol it was accepting - ftp.some.dom for ftp, www.some.dom for web servers, news.some.dom for usenet. But this was just convention. With search engines providing links and smarter nameservers, edge routers/firewalls and web servers, it is trivial to translate some.dom, www.some.dom etc to point to your web server. Now, some people forget about the www (because it is a faff to say, although kiwis say it dub-dub-dub, which I like), others don’t, and clever admins set up both. Si ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2006, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/5 "2006-12-15T22:16:55Z")
[QUOTE=si\_blakely] Now, some people forget about the www (because it is a faff to say, although kiwis say it dub-dub-dub, which I like), others don’t, and clever admins set up both. [/QUOTE] I find myself annoyed by a commercial on the radio that mentions the company’s Web site. In an apparent attempt to sound hip and trendy, the voiceover says, “Go to triple-double-u dot foo dot com!” Anyway, technically speaking “www” is the name of the particular server hosting the Web site. This is a bit archaic of course, from the days before huge banks of servers. When traffic proved to be too much for a single server machine, the site owner would add more servers, so you’d get names like “[www2.foo.com](http://www2.foo.com)”, “[www3.foo.com](http://www3.foo.com)”, etc. The user would type [www.foo.com](http://www.foo.com), and if the machine named “www” was too busy to handle the request, it would shuffle the visitor on over to [www2.foo.com](http://www2.foo.com). ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2006, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bonehead-stupid-internet-question/384338/6 "2006-12-16T03:20:24Z")
[QUOTE=groman] The person who registers [somesite.com](http://somesite.com) has further authority over anything below that domain, for example [blah.somesite.com](http://blah.somesite.com), [blah.blah.somesite.com](http://blah.blah.somesite.com), etc. “www” is not particularly special, it’s just a convention [/QUOTE] This is the crux of the matter. A second-level domain owner can call his web server anything he wants; it’s just that “www” was kind of catchy. In fact, the site you’re on right now is called [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com). (BTW I worked at the company who did business under the InterNIC trademark.)