Random Fun Fact Because It's 4am And I Can't Sleep

When you want to visit a website, you type its address into a web browser and press the Enter key.  OK, so you knew that.  But less well-known is the fact that for nearly every website, you don’t need to type the "www" at the front of a site’s address.  (And of course, you never need to type the http:// because your web-browser will add that automatically.)

Whether the www-rule is true depends on how the owner of a given website has configured the server.  But for nearly all websites, "www.foo.com" is just a shortcut to "foo.com" or vice-versa; either way, there is only one website there, it’s just got two addresses.

For example, visit hp.com.  If you look quickly, you’ll notice that the address you just typed has been automatically changed to www.hp.com.  The same is true for microsoft.com.  My website, on the other hand, automatically changes www.nodivisions.com to just nodivisions.com.  Then some sites like dell.com don’t do any auto-redirection like that; both dell.com and www.dell.com are allowed by the server.  In all these cases, each site has only one set of webpages; the pages just happen to be accessible through two different addresses, foo.com and www.foo.com.