I’m not sure what makes it difficult people putting in a DNS entry so that [somesite].com redirects to www.[somesite].com. I hit Argos yesterday only to find out that apparently they use Websphere. That’s all very nice to know as a techie, but as a customer, it’s not quite the user experience I want.
Nice.
When I blogged about this I got a couple of comments on this.
http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2007/01/05/www-why-why-why/
Load balancing/caching/shtuff. I bet Argos use…
Yes, yes they do – they use Akamai’s edge-cache network for caching/load-balancing.
http://www.argos.co.uk is a CNAME for http://www.argos.co.uk.edgekey.net, which is a CNAME for e624.r.akamaiedge.net, which has the IP 88.221.2.168 (at least, it does from my server in Germany – the IP you get will depend on your location, such is the magic of Akamai).
CNAMEs can only be used for a DNS entry that has no other records. “argos.co.uk” will have MX records for delivering mail; it will have NS records for specifying its nameservers. Because of this, it can’t have CNAME records, so Akamai’s lovely solution can’t be used on plain old “argos.co.uk”, but can be used on “www.argos.co.uk”.
That said, there are much better solutions that don’t lead to your screenshot; the canonical solution is to have a lightweight HTTP daemon listening on that address and sending a “HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect” to http://www.argos.co.uk