Fastest . => www. Redirect?

[MarkForst]

Hi folks,

how is it possible to get instant redirects like from

nytimes.com => http://www.nytimes.com


its crazy fast. can anyone tell me how big sites are able to do that? when i hit enter i instantly ge the => www. redirect..

thanks a lot for your help!
mark

[WebsiteSpeedExperts]

Most websites use a htaccess or http config redirect which will redirect the visitor prior to the server hitting something like the php hypervisor. What thia means in general terms is that the site admins configure their server to send and traffic which matches certain patterns to another address and thwn close the connnection.

[Fleck_Lannis]

I think thats not really the point. Of course you need use htaccess instead of i.e. some wordpress or php 301.

but still, if you use htaccess on a "normal" website, you will never get these extreme fast redirects to www as for example on http://nytimes.com

I would also be very interested how this is possible. any ideas?

[josephscott]

A request to nytimes.com responds with "HTTP/1.1 301 http://www.nytimes.com/", so nothing particularly special going on there.

They are using Varnish, so it could be that is where they've configured the redirect.

[JamesAtPulsate]

43ms is nice alright. Of course it's not being directed to https so that helps some. I wonder if varnish plays a role in that 43ms time.

https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/...irectInVCL

[pmeenan]

As far as your local experience goes, a 301 is a cacheable "permanent" redirect to the browser remembers it and never sends the original request.