Wwwizer: Solve your naked domain problem. Put 'www' in front of your domain name | Hacker News Reader

Wwwizer: Solve your naked domain problem. Put 'www' in front of your domain name

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14 pointsdushan0113 comments

Wow, this is a terrible idea. Pointing all your domains to a service you don't control with no formal, legal contract on what they can and can't do with the domains you point at them?

Hi! I am Dmitry Ulupov and I am running this service. You can talk directly to me at any time. My email is dima at ulupov dot com.

What a terrible idea for me would be screwing up with people websites?

Right now the service is used by more than 5000 websites and gets just shy of 10m hits a month. If anything would happen quite a few people will know who is at fault. But when any popular internet service goes down you are just getting formal apology from nobody.

Same as getting out of the bed every morning...

If they stop offering their service, just change your DNS record, and viola. I do not see how this could be a dangerous to you.

With some ISP's caching DNS for >48 hours regardless of your TTL. And sometimes browsers caching pages for even longer. Stopping offering the service is fine. Ending up with your domain pointed to a site that isn't yours is an entirely different thing. They could run a phishing site and users wouldn't have any way of knowing.

I'm a little late to the discussion, but I have to point out it's actually very easy (and free) to create your own "Wwwizer" on Heroku (this assuming that your DNS service cannot solve it). It's just 8 lines of code.

Shameless plug, but if you want instructions: http://bionicspirit.com/blog/2012/01/10/domains-merged.html

Alternately, use any competent DNS provider.

You can also do this with CloudFlare in front of your site and get all the other services for free as well.

I prefer naked domains. www., feels like a hard to pronounce anachronism.

My memory was that WWW was chosen to be hard to pronounce - an academic joke where the acronym had three times as many syllables as its expansion. I can't find any evidence to back that up though, only this, which makes just a fleeting reference to the difficulty of pronunciation:

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Spelling

"triple-dub".

Thank you.

Why in the hell would you want to do this?

Because of 'naked domain problem'. You can not create CNAME record with naked domain. And if you want to host your blog on Amazon S3, you have to use CNAME...

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