Why do Westerners like the www subdomain in the website address, while we have the root of the domain?

Question

Domain Name System

I noticed that when working on English-language customer sites, almost everyone wants the site to be rotated on the www subdomain. And transition simply to the domain - redirected.
And here, in the Russian-speaking environment, they like it more so that the root of the domain is used. (yandex.ru - www.google.com | vk.com - www.facebook.com)
(Subjectively, of course - both they and we have different options - www.mvideo.ru, www.aeroflot.ru)
And I somehow have no arguments to explain to customers how best. And at the very confusion - on which site which address.
Not that it would be a critical question, but just wondering: did anyone have a similar opinion? Any ideas why that is? And most importantly - are there any minuses / pluses in the approaches?

Answer 1

Technically, it's possible either way. But, as always, there are nuances that most advisers pour in (including in this thread).
If you only have a website on a domain, maximum mail on other ports, and even a CDN is not used, you can safely use the main domain without www. If your site is multilingual, and languages ​​are hosted on subdomains - then also without www. If you have other resources in the domain, for example:
www.example.com - public site
developers.example.com - public site for developer
tools api.example.com - some public API
cdn.example.com - subdomain content delivery network (multiple possible - cdn1, cdn2, etc.)
docs.example.com - public documentation
help.example.com - public reference
support.example.com - public support service
dev.example.com - private, non-public copy of the site, staging
hr.example.com - private, non-public part, internal company resources for employees
mail.example.com - technical subdomain for
webmail. example.com - web-face for mail (can be either public or open for individual IPs, access via VPN, etc.)
vpn.example.com - purely technical subdomain for proxying traffic through the company's VPN
ns1.example.com - subdomain for your name server (ns1/ns2/ns3 or primary/secondary, etc.)
... etc. There can be a lot of such subdomains, and each has its own, completely isolated kitchen. So, if you use a domain without www for a public site, then all its cookies will be distributed to all subdomains. Is that bad. There are at least 10 of these cookies on a modern site, most of them are completely unnecessary, or even frankly superfluous on all other subdomains. At the same time, if you use www and want to share cookies from it with another subdomain - it is quite possible to do this, consciously.
In addition, it is much more convenient to work with www at the DNS level if it is a CNAME. For type A records, it is better to set a long TTL, but CNAME can have a short one and can be transferred at any time. A DDoS attack has begun - in a matter of minutes, traffic was allowed through the gate of the DDoS protection service or a dedicated firewall (which has different IP addresses). Or load balancing. At the same time, the main domain (origin) and its IP do not change, mail does not crash, internal services do not crash, APIs do not fall, etc.
Here you can read a little about security issues related to forced broadcasting of all cookies to all subdomains.
In general, my opinion - if you have your own personal website or a small website of a small personal business, and growth to the level when you need a lot of subdomains is not planned - then you can safely use it without www. If a product or service, a business that can grow into something relatively large - start from www from the very beginning, then you will say thank you.

Answer 2

https://stackoverflow.com/a/413531/10079855

Answer 3

For the first time I hear that in the West it was common to add www.
I myself work only with foreign customers (Australia, USA, Canada, Israel, Europe). All domains always without www.
There really is no difference. A matter of taste. The main thing is to choose one notation and make a hard redirect from one domain to another.

Answer 4

Bare domain cookies (without www) are valid for all subdomains, i.e. security problems are possible, so English-speaking customers prefer not to take risks - a business that has been cultivated for centuries does not like unnecessary potential troubles. In Russia, they love prettiness, and they usually spit on possible fakes from a high bell tower. I myself have sites without www, I'm Russian, but I'm starting to think :) The problem is not so acute if there are no subdomains with separate services other than www (and from it a redirect to a bare domain, not a separate site) and it won't happen.

Answer 5

In general, I do this: if the domain is short (3-5 characters), then I do it with www so that it seems longer, if more than 5 characters, then without www. :)

Answer 6

the webface dominates and is often the only interface of the site.
from a technical point of view, there is no difference in the names.
allocation of subdomains is convenient if you need to scatter the load on several machines.

Answer 7

A nuance that can be missed: where will the owner "shine" his address?
If only on the Internet - there is no difference.
If on paper - the prefix can be useful for understanding that these letters are generally the address of the site, or it can make it ridiculous or unnecessarily complicate it.
And, of course, www.site.rf is just a mockery of logic;)

Answer 8

There are problems when organizing request balancing when you send all requests to the 2nd level domain instead of the third one, for example, DNS records for the 2nd level are updated for a long time.
For a regular site, there is not much difference, I send all requests to the 2nd level.

Answer 9

www. not physically needed, but the Internet is not just a web, to be precise, not a web at all. And for the convenience of understanding, I made a postscript to the domain in order to understand how the protocol processes it and in general it is understood what the conversation is about.
As a result, all domain names became associated with the web, so the need for this disappeared.
so this is just a tribute to traditions, since the bourgeoisie has an older Internet relative to Russia
, then the sites in the index lie more with vvv.
By the way, www browser 0.1 version was recently published;) though he himself is online
https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/

Answer 10

The reason is completely different. Many resources have already been created a long time ago and have a large number of links that just go with www in order not to lose their weight through a redirect, leaving the main address with just three w's.

Answer 11

VVV has developed historically, it is obvious that now the tendency has been to abandon VVV for many years