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Comment by morecoffee | Hacker News Reader

> Because of this we strongly recommend that you always host your main site or app on www or any other subdomain (app.example.com is perfectly fine as well).

There is real, measurable value to no-www. To anyone here who owns a public website, do visitors mainly go to the www or no-www version of your site? (assuming you don't redirect) Are the short or long versions of your URLs shared more?

I would be willing to bet there is a strong inverse correlation between link size and likelihood of being clicked. Anecdotally, on my own site of about ~1k daily active users, the no-www urls were used almost exclusively. Using www to avoid the rare disaster of DoS is unwise.

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> There is real, measurable value to no-www.

Citation needed.

> I would be willing to bet there is a strong inverse correlation between link size and likelihood of being clicked.

4 extra characters (www.) is a pretty small fraction of the total link length most of the time, when people link to individual blog posts or what have you. I'd argue that readability of the link is far more important, and www does not harm that.

Citation isn't needed. If you read one sentence later in my comment you can see I asked readers to look at their logs to confirm my statement. The next sentence after is confirming with my own data that visitor of my site preferred the no-www.

The reason to not use www is in your logs.

Just because your users don't use www doesn't mean that there's any value there above if you had a www only site.

    > Anecdotally, on my own site of about ~1k daily
    > active users, the no-www urls were used almost
    > exclusively.

Not sure what this is supposed to prove. You should be redirecting one to the other, so it doesn't matter if people find it more convenient to manually type in one form over the other unless you're telling me you're trying to optimize out the redirect, which seems just as specialized as using www- for TFA's DDoS concerns.

I type in "google.com" every time and don't care that it redirects me to "www.google.co.uk" every time. I don't even notice.

"do visitors mainly go to the www or no-www version of your site?"

Visitors follow links - just checked netlify.com vs www.netlify.com and over the last 3 days around 0.5% of visits went to netlify.com instead of straight to www.netlify.com

It's generally far more important to setup your site to be as performant as possible and get the best uptime than to skip the the www - there are ways to get the best of both worlds however.

Are you sure that isn't because you are redirecting? Where does https://netlify.com/blog/2016/01/12/this-weekends-ddos-attac... point? Google is going to index and show the www version if you always redirect. You have interfered with the results so the 0.5% is biased.

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