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Comment by hadrien01 | Hacker News Reader

http://example.com should work, it doesn't force https

Can't get it to work. But http://matsemann.com works. I think the difference is that my domain works even without a "Host" header.

Edit: Not quite correct that it works. My domain responds with a different dummy-page in IE 1.5. I get the same dummy-page with curl

  curl http://matsemann.com -i --http1.0 -v -H 'Host:'

Difference being it's served as 200, while same command for example.com with no host gives 404.

I think the web is just broken without host headers, as too much is running on the same ips / through routers before touching the real underlying page.

Host headers are explicitly required by the spec, and there are no clients left that leave them out (including non-browser clients like curl and wget). There is simply no reason to facilitate requests that have no Host header, so servers receiving them quite rightly serve some kind of error response.

Required by the HTTP 1.1 spec, not the HTTP 1.0 spec

Or http://neverssl.com

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