Boris Mann’s Personal Blog

Jun 2012

The way WP.com supports domain names is messy.

WordPress.com automatically removes the “www” from all URLs. Mapping the “www” subdomain is not supported.
via Map a Subdomain — Support — WordPress.com.

This is weird and messy. Either I can move my DNS / name servers to WP.com (which I am not comfortable doing - best practice is to keep your name servers separate from your hosting, so you can redirect if necessary).

Or, I can choose a subdomain.

So, this is now blog.bmann.ca. I will likely move bmann.ca to Octopress & an Amazon S3 bucket as well. Although I’m not sure that I need that top level domain doing anything, so for now, www and the root domain both redirect here.

Tumblr and Posterous both support root A records (which is messy because it ties into a single IP) as well as subdomain CNAMEs including www. If WP.com supported ‘www’, this would be a non-issue.

I guess this is another example of picking your use cases / target customers. Either host your full name servers with WP.com and they’ll handle everything, or be OK with the downsides of a non-www subdomain.