Remove WWW prefix from your website

Question

How does Stack Overflow (and other web sites) remove the \'www\' prefix when it\'s entered as part of a URL?

Is it a redirect, a rewrite or something else entirely?<

Answer 1

This is going a long way back, but as far as I know this is a DNS setup. I think you don't need to specify a HOST address (WWW is the name of the host (or computer/cluster...) that the site resides on/in.).

I think you can then set it up to send all requests to a default host.

Not 100% sure, but check out what is possible with DNS.

Hope that helps or at least get's you going in the right direction.

Answer 2

On Apache, it looks like this (inside an .htaccess file):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Answer 3

For apache

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName yourdomain.tld
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.tld