Yeah, I don't like the current trend to redirect www to root. You can easily doing simple dns-based load balancing by having multiple ip addresses on the www subdomain. You can't do that on root domain, you'll have to use a dedicated load balancer even if all you want is just simple load balancing among a small set of servers. It only benefit cloud vendors and hurt hobbyist/small website operators if this trend continues to the point that visitors expect all websites to be served from root insetad of www.

If we could ever be bothered to implement SRV records for http then load balancing and failover could be significantly more straightforward and robust, without worrying about root vs. www at all.

I also dislike the trend to redirect the 'www' prefix to root.

My company uses DNS load balancing for a root domain, though, so either I'm misunderstanding you or you're mistaken about what's possible here.

We use Constellix's DNS management to have round-robin DNS via multiple A records for 'nxtbook.com'.

If you're thinking of some other form of DNS load balancing, would you please clarify?

Multiple A records is fine on root domain, but root can't use CNAME, which is used by some people to implement their dns load balancing (I use cname so I forgot that you can still do it using A records). By using root domain instead of www, your options for load balancing is diminished.

Edit: another common use case is hosting your static website on S3 or github pages. Typically it's done by adding a cname entry to s3 or github.io (been a while so hopefully I remember it right). You can't do this on root, unless you're using another server as reverse proxy (e.g. cloudflare's cname flattening service). Again, it's benefits cloud vendors (cloudflare got more potential customers by offering this service for free) but ultimately hurt people that want to host their small websites.

Ah, gotcha. We CNAME a lot of things precisely so we don't have to mess with multiple A records.

Definitely simpler, and a good argument against using the root domain.

Thanks for clarifying!

Redirecting a subdomain to root should be a choice not forced.