what difference does www make?

[jpallman]

Okay,

So here is the thing, I just noticed by chance today that our church's website redirects if you do not use the www in front of the address.

If you type "www.dayspringonline.net" in it goes HERE to our church's website, as it should. But if you just type in "dayspringonline.net" it takes you HERE to I-beam solutions which is our webhost.

So my question is twofold, why and what do I need to do to fix it? Is our DNS messed up?

FYI, our youth site works fine "www.electrifiedyouth.org" takes you to the same place that "electrifiedyouth.org" does. However we use a completely different host & domain registration for that site (doing stuff the same would be way too simple)

[[Admin] danroth]

an over-simple explanation:

requests to servers come in on different ports
www.example.com maps to a different port than simply example.com (or ftp.example.com, etc.)
www tells the server to connect to the HTTP port where your website is found
many servers are set up so that if you leave out the www part, it will send you to the right port anyway - but not all are, for various reasons

[tvalencheck]

Sounds Like a DNS issue...
I would call your hosting company and have them leed you through entering in the correct info into your DNS Manager... Being that if your E-mail is on the same domain then their is a chance you can mess up your E-mail and that can take hours to re-poppulate once it is fixed.

[waynehoskins]

Somewhat technical simplification:
example.com is a domain which contains multiple servers
www.example.com is a particular host (physical or virtual) on the example.com domain named www, which serves world-wide web traffic. As opposed to ftp.example.com, which is the FTP server two racks over.

If you just type in the domain name into your browser (with the appropriate protocol), what comes back is the default host for that service on that domain. Something like that.

[gletiecq]

Using nslookup, it seems you've resolved any DNS issues (if there were any), since they're both pointing to the same IP address. There are no port issues, nor DNS issues at this point.

If your webserver is Apache, your hosting provider needs to add a ServerAlias entry to the configuration file. They should have done this by default. If they're using IIS, there's some other entry but I wouldn't know what it is. I avoid IIS as much as possible.

Unless you're managing the webserver configuration files yourself, your hosting company has messed up, not you.

[rkresge]

Originally Posted by jpallman

Okay,

So here is the thing, I just noticed by chance today that our church's website redirects if you do not use the www in front of the address.

If you type "www.dayspringonline.net" in it goes HERE to our church's website, as it should. But if you just type in "dayspringonline.net" it takes you HERE to I-beam solutions which is our webhost.

So my question is twofold, why and what do I need to do to fix it? Is our DNS messed up?

FYI, our youth site works fine "www.electrifiedyouth.org" takes you to the same place that "electrifiedyouth.org" does. However we use a completely different host & domain registration for that site (doing stuff the same would be way too simple)

This is a DNS issue. You might want to add cname DNS entries like this: "*.dayspringonline.net", and another like this: "dayspringonline.net", both of which point to your Web server. That way you could type in "whatever.dayspringonline.net" and it would still reach your Web server.

Roger