Seriously, you still type www. in front of a domain name in ?

The history of the www subdomain

In the early 90s, the Web was not the only service on the Internet. It was one service among many. To distinguish between different services, subdomains were used: www indicated a web service, while other subdomains such as ftp, mail, or gopher were used for other services.

Today, the Web has become the main way most people use the Internet. Other services still exist, but many are either less visible to the public or limited to specific use cases. The www subdomain is now mostly a relic of the past, and it is no longer necessary to type it before a domain name.

But why use subdomains at all, when URLs already contain the protocol name like http://example.com or ftp://example.com ? The real reason is infrastructure: different services typically ran on different physical machines. A DNS subdomain can resolve to a different IP address, so www.example.com could point to one server and ftp.example.com to another. This allowed organizations to host, scale, and administer each service independently, without any coupling between them.

Users don't need to know the protocol name. They just type a domain name, and the browser handles the rest. Modern browsers default to HTTPS and enforce it through mechanisms like HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), which allows a server to instruct browsers to only connect over HTTPS in the future, and through HSTS preload lists built into the browsers themselves. This makes the protocol transparent to the user while still ensuring secure connections.

Today, the use of subdomains is still common for organizational purposes, such as separating different sections of a website or providing different services under the same domain name. However, the use of www as a subdomain is no longer necessary for most websites, and many have chosen to drop it altogether.

The history of protocols usage on the Internet.

in 1993

Today