Whats the difference between sites with www. prefix or without if any?
Generally it doesn’t make any difference – you visit the site with or without www. However, sometimes a site will use something called a subdomain. In fact, Yahoo! Answers is on a subdomain… answers.yahoo.com In this case, the prefix does make a difference because it has been set up to. Sometimes a site will use different subdomains like www2 and www3 to do load balancing between servers, but generally www. or not you’ll get to the same site.
Let’s take this even one step higher: What is a domain, ie. a “website address”? When you enter a website’s address to your browser, the browser will go and try to find out which other computer to contact to get the webpage you want to see. To do so it needs to find it’s IP address. You can compare this to having a name and trying to find out the telephone number to that name by browsing a phone book. There are special servers in the internet, called DNS (Domain Name Servers), that help your browser to do that. You can try to access your responsible name server by using the program “nslookup” which comes bundled with windows. If you now have a domain, once with and once without “www”, you actually have two completely different names. Okay, they are not really completely different, because they partly match, but coming back to the phone book analogy, there may be a “Jason Smith” and a “Jason L. Smith” in the phone book. They MIGHT be the same person. They MIGHT be two persons who share
