Re: http://www. vs. http://

*** NOTE: I'm moving this discussion off of the midrangenews.net thread.
Dan wrote:
> I have noticed that some websites are finicky about this, but I have 
> never understood why.  I have a website that works either way, 
> 69Torino.Info or www.69Torino.Info, but I never explicitly did 
> anything to effect that.

If you aren't using virtual servers (as is the case for the main
midrange.web site, which is running on an iSeries "Powered by Apache"),
then basically all requests that are sent to the web server are
processed by the same server definition and thus receive the same content.

All my other servers (archive.midrange.com, lists.midrange.com,
faq.midrange.com, wiki.midrange.com) are served from one of 5 different
IP's that were allocated to me by my dsl provider.  Since I don't want
to be limited to only 5 sites, I'm using the virtual server capabilities
of apache.  Basically a single apache server instance (on iSeries or any
other system) interrogates the web request and determines the host name
that is being requested ... and hands the request off to the appropriate
virtual server container in the configuration.

This puts a bit more onus on the web browser to pass the actual server
it's trying to communicate with (which is part of the HTTP/1.1
standard), but it works quite well.

> How does one get "cheap" by Rob's example?

>From a technical standpoint, it doesn't.  There's no cost.  His provider
might nickel & dime him, but there's not valid reason for it.

david