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Should one always use "www" as the prefix to one's official domain name? I will be launching an e-commerce website shortly and my attorney needs to know the official domain name of my site for copyright purposes. Are there any reasons why I should designate it as "www.example.com" as opposed to "example.com"? I've always used "example.com" during development because it was easier to type and I'd have Nginx rewrite all requests for "www.example.com" to "example.com". Should I perhaps say "www.example.com" is the official domain name and reconfigure Nginx to rewrite all requests to "example.com" to "www.example.com"?

Thanks!

Jim
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ServerFault is not the place for legal advise, talk to your lawyer for that.

In general though you copyright your brandname and not <brandname> + TLD.

The only reason to use the pattern "<something> dot COM" or "<something> dot other-TLD" as your brandname is that you can't get away with copyrighting just plain <something> by itself as the brand.

Another reason not to include the extension is that you don't want a competitor to be able to get away with drawing away customers from your .COM by using "<something>.CO.UK", "<something>.CA" etc.

IMHO There is no good reason at all to even consider including WWW in your brand.

Note: That is just my recommendation on the brand, not a recommendation on what to use as the DNS name(s) for your website...

HBruijn
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  • Thanks HBruijn. My question probably could have been worded a little better. I'm not copyrighting my domain name. But the official domain name will have to be specified in some legal documents. That's why I was asking. – Jim Aug 08 '16 at 19:52
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Since a domain name is used on other services than simply the web server, I would go with the domain name alone.

Of course, this is not a technical question as it has absolutely no impact on your operations and it is common practice to allow both http://example.com and http://www.example.com.

Julie Pelletier
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  • Actually there are technical issues here (disclaimer: my site). – Michael Hampton Aug 08 '16 at 19:15
  • As you mention on your site, it is a good idea to redirect non-www to www. That has nothing to do with the site's copyright. – Julie Pelletier Aug 08 '16 at 19:18
  • He's asked both about branding, and about redirection. – Michael Hampton Aug 08 '16 at 19:19
  • And I answered both. Not sure how you're misreading what I wrote but it is indeed a good idea to redirect everything to the www version or otherwise it can make the development slightly more complex in order for both versions to work properly. – Julie Pelletier Aug 08 '16 at 19:25
  • Obviously I misunderstood the "this is not a technical question" that I thought I saw in your post. – Michael Hampton Aug 08 '16 at 19:34
  • Thanks all for your comments. I decided to call the company where my domain names are registered (it's a large, well-known company) and they suggested that I use what they called the "bare domain name" meaning a name like "example.com". When you do a search on any of these domain registrars, they say that the search is always on "example.com" or "example.net" etc., not on "www.example.com". This makes sense to me so I'm going to go with the "example.com" name format when specifying my "official domain name". – Jim Aug 08 '16 at 19:57
  • @MichaelHampton Thanks for the article about redirection! I'll be sure to implement it in my Nginx configuration. – Jim Aug 08 '16 at 22:11