What are the benefits of choosing http://www.xyz.com as the main domain instead of http://xyz.com? [closed]

Question

I recently learned that http://www.xyz.com is not the same as http://xyz.com. I also learnt that when a user go to either site, the creator of xyz.com has the option to choose a "main" domain.

From what I know, when we type stackoverflow chooses http://stackoverflow.com over http://www.stackoverflow.com. On the other hand, Google choose http://www.google.com over http://google.com.

What are the benefits of choosing http://www.xyz.com as the main domain instead of http://xyz.com and vice-versa ?

Answer 1

It's site owner preference, but sometimes it looks nicer if you have a short domain name. You can use services like wwwizer or one that I host that redirects your "naked" domain to www.domain.com and there are mod_rewrite techniques that do the opposite and remove them. And many internet users naturally type www.domain.com so you need a copy of the site on both, or redirect.

Popping this into an .htaccess file in the root of your website makes all naked.domains go to www.normal.domains:

#Naked Domain Redirects
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^\.]+\.[^\.]+)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1/$1 [R=301,L]