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Anne TroyFlag for United States of America

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How to get www before the domain name in cpanel or whm

lvcotd.org never shows the www. All the instructions out there tell me "create an A record". When I do that, it says it already exists. Yes, I have a Wordpress blog, but it's in a subdirectory /blog, and shouldn't have anything to do with the root. Correct? Anyway, how do I get it to show as www.lvcotd.org ?

Thanks!!
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Patrick Bogers
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Where am I looking for that file? Where am I running the service from? Am I in cpanel or WHM?
Ah it is hosted somewhere else. Then it should be in cPanel-> Domains->Parked domains.
With "lvcotd.org" as the A record in your DNS, 'www.lvcotd.org' should be a CNAME record.  Technically, the 'www' is a subdomain.
www is allready pingable and resolves to the same host so imho you should look into the alias (parked domain)
Okay. I am also the host, though. Looking. :)
I tried to park www.lvcotd.org

"You cannot park your main domain!" - Msg from cpanel.
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Ha. Thank you. I see now that Firefox is causing it. I have nothing but problems with Firefox. It used to be IE that gave me all the problems. I think perhaps I had fixed it, but tested in FF.  FF always crashes on me, too, these days. Thanks very much!
The missing question in this thread is WHY do you want the www to show in the address bar? The reality is that on most servers, www.domain.com and the simplified domain.com will be handled identically if using a web browser on port 80. If you are using cPanel and WHM, then these are by default exactly like that.

Now if there is a particular reason you want the www to appear in the address bar on the browser, share that info so maybe the answers will change to meet your needs. SEO operations tend to have two ways of doing this... One is to rewrite the URL to force the www to appear if the person did not type it in and only typed "domain.com" into the browser. The other way is to rewrite the URL to eliminate the www even if the user typed "www.domin.com" into the browser. The goal is two fold. 1. Keep consistency in the way the link is reflected in search engines such that the same page on your site does not have two links in say Google, one with the www and one without. 2. Google really dings you for having multiple sites that have the same content. In the eyes of Google, www.domain.com and domain.com are two very different sites and they expect the content to be different. If they determine these sites have identical content, your rankings will be punished and lowered. Same thing goes if you have two distinctly different domain names, not just the www/non-www issue.

I do not know if this information helps you or not but if you could expand on the WHY question, there might be more good info that you could use to solve the real issue.
The only time that I know of that it is 'important' to have or not have the 'www' is for basic SSL/TLS certificates that will only work with one or the other.  More expensive certificates can be set up to work with either or both.
@Dave - Good point also...
I'm reading what you're saying and appreciate your comments. Thing is, they never DIDN'T have the www until I created this web. Whether this is new in my host reseller scalahosting.com or in cpanel or what, I do not know.

This isn't a business, either, but a non-profit. We're not that worried about them being found because they are generally learned about in speaking engagements. It's already on page 4 and I have not submitted it to Google yet.
That's confusing.  Your main page works with and without the 'www'.  Where are you having a problem?  Note that the actual domain name is without the 'www'.
Thing is, they never DIDN'T have the www until I created this web.

I'm talking years of creating websites...
But you're not saying where you are having a problem.  Currently, http://www.lvcotd.org/ and http://lvcotd.org/ are the same page.

I have encountered several websites that use the plain version for one thing and the 'www' version for another.  It's not common but they are separate records in your DNS and they are allowed to point to different things.

If you are talking strictly about your Wordpress pages, there is often an '.htaccess' file that Apache uses to 're-write' URLs so they will match the perma-links that Wordpress stores in the database.  In that case, Wordpress is rewriting the URLs to match it's needs.

For what it's worth, I put up my first web site in 1997.