[bwblabs]

A no-www domain might not be the best solution if you ever want a 'Cookie-free Domain' (static.) for images etc. which speeds up your site. If you start with a no-www domain you have to setup a different domain (no subdomain) for it: like sstatic.net for SO, ytimg.com for YT and yimg.com for Yahoo.

When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there.

If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies. In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#cookie_fre...

[ralph]

I'm not sure that works well with SPDY; it would prefer the same domain?

[retube]

I never considered this before. A great tip, thanks

[ZoFreX]

Bear in mind that making sure requests for static content don't send cookies is pretty far down the front-end optimisation ladder - there are normally a lot of things you can do first that are quicker, easier, and have a bigger impact.

[bwblabs]

Well another thing is that it's easier to setup GEO-ip stuff in a CNAME (so www) instead of the root A records, for now at least in PowerDNS (used by Wikipedia etc.). You're completely right, but if your sites ever scales to something big you're not in the best position with a no-www, in my view having a www record (and no-www redirect) has more benefits that a no-www.