I clicked your link. Then tried a few variations of it. Didn't work. It's online now. That means they can't do HA and rolling updates on the cheap despite all the software/hardware to do so. Can't rely on that but they'll pull off:
"This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other."
Wouldn't rely on it for production. I'll go back later and check it out for curiosity, though.
See, the thing is, something.com and www.something.com are different DNS records.
As far as dns is concerned, there is nothing special about www. You could say bob.something.com.
There is a cultural expectation (mostly from people who started using the internet after the late '90s) that www.something.com goes to the same place as something.com, but as far as DNS is concerned, the two are completely different records.
(in the late '90s, one of my tasks at my first programming job was to write a patch to mod_vhost_alias to implement company policy... e.g. to make www.ourcustomer.com go to the same place as ourcustomer.com the patch was required because www.ourcustomer.co.uk also needed to go to the same place as ourcustomer.co.uk, so I couldn't just take the rightmost three chunks)
The upshot is that people who have been around longer, and who like to be curmudgeonly about it will often configure www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com to go to different places, because they are different records. (of course, some would say that this is so they have a chance to explain this, and a chance to feel superior to those who need this explained.)
I get that this is how it works and maybe for some reason people like to treat www as any other subdomain and send it somewhere else - but is there any reason beyond not configuring dns to just blackhole www traffic like that site does?
If you are actually trying to understand this phenomena, I suggest checking out the silicon valley lug webpage. it's at http://www.svlug.org - http://svlug.org now has a 'hey stupid' note that redirects after a few seconds. This page was put up after a lot of moaning from some of the older lug members who thought that the normal user expectation that www.something.com and something.com would go to the same place was, well, stupid, and a sign of the sort of person we don't really want or need to communicate with.
Of course, this is the opposite of the bit people in this thread were complaining about. http://www.svlug.org has always been live, it's http://svlug.org that was dark until the youngsters complained.
A well-understood phenomenon in DNS that most admins take care of to ensure users with a reasonable expectation end up in the right place. Further, a common case a admin should account for. Then, there's these admins and their apologists...
And another try has root working but not www. Need I say more lol?
I get that they're different records, www just seems like the one subdomain that everyone expects to be synonymous with the root. Even if that isn't where you want your resources to "live," it's an essentially free way to help people get to your site -- like googel.com redirecting to google, except, as you said, with like 15 years of ingrained user training.
