Mine uses mail, DNS and other services as well and they may not be on the same machines.
You say that like DNS isn't flexible enough to handle www at http://example.com and mail.example.com records on different IPs. I
I don't think that's his point at all. "example.com" has no indication of what its usage is for. Your request would have to fall back to using ports to determine what service you're requesting - 25, 110, and so forth. Or, yes, the ubiquitous 80. For some people, that's absolutely fine, and yes, I use that shorthand when I type in website addresses, because I expect it to work. But if my svn server is on an entirely different machine than "example.com", using "example.com" won't get me there unless I do port forwarding on the example.com server itself. From a server architecture standpoint, I /do/ want www.example.com, mail.example.com, svn.example.com, and so forth to refer to the specific machines that power those ports. I treat "example.com" as nothing more than shorthand for the most /prevalent/ request, which is usually HTTP. The only way, however, to be assured that you are hitting my web server, my svn server, or my rsync server, is to specifically refer to it by its full name, being www., svn., or rsync. -- Morbus Iff ( and i twirled my hair and i popped my gum ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus