This is one of my personal pet peeves and something that should never happen in 2004. I’m visiting a site and most of the files are clearly hosted on a second, specialized web hosting company — in this case the web hosting companie specializes in hosting multimedia files and markets itself as such. So I try to visit the website’s hosting page to see if they have a directory of other sites they host, but it comes up 404. I try it again in case I misspelled the domain name. Again 404.
Then, even though I think it can’t possibly be the problem, I add the www. to the domain name, and it works. Maybe I’m picky but if www.genericwebhosting.tld works, but genericwebhosting.tld does not, I’m looking elsewhere for a webhost. There’s just no excuse in my mind for that to happen, but a surprising number of web sites are configured this way (I have even heard clueless people argue that it is *bad idea* to configure www.domainname.tld to work if the user just types in domainname.tld. Sure, and make sure you add a big ass splash page and lots of Flash navigation to really add to the usability).