Frequently Asked Questions

By default, this is the correct behavior. Using URLs of the form http://example.com/ creates a number of problems, and we strongly recommend that you avoid it. Some of the limitations are:

• It creates noncanonical URLs for your site. It is highly desirable to have one URL for each page, for purposes of bookmarking, etc. Having multiple valid URLs for the same page makes your site look less popular, both in rankings and search engines.
• It is less reliable. DNS CNAME records cannot be used in this situation. You can put in a couple of A records, but this is still not as effective for load balancing and fault tolerance as doing it the "right" way.
• It becomes hopelessly confusing if you have (or might ever have) more than one web site under the domain. (Which site does example.com refer to?)
• One name should do one thing. Bare domain names already serve the purpose of organizing the domain, and often they do email duty as well. Web traffic is better kept in its own box. This aids filtering, debugging, and compartmentalizing services.

Despite this, this is something that visitors to your site expect to work, The best compromise solution we have found is to redirect visitors from example.com to your www.example.com alias.

The best way to do this is to add the example.com alias to your site and (unless you are using WordPress) enable the hard canonical type setting. If you are using WordPress, it will manage your host names automatically, and you should leave the canonical type setting to off.

If there is a specific reason that won't work for you, you can create a second, static site that automatically redirects people to the preferred name.