Redundant Hostnames Issue in GA

[TheCraig]

I noticed another post on this, but I have another question.  I am getting this message from Analytics:

Property http://www.example.com is receiving data from redundant hostnames. Consider setting up a 301 redirect on your website, or make a search and replace filter that strips "www." from hostnames. Examples of redundant hostnames: example.com, www.example.com.

We don't have a 301 in place that manages this and I am quite concerned about handling that the right way.  We do have a canonical on our homepage that says:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" /> I asked on another site how to safely set up our 301 and I got this response:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

Is this the best way of handling it?  Are there situations where this would not be the best way?

We do have a few subdomains like beta.example.com in use and have a rather large site, so I just want to make sure I get it right.

Thanks for your help!

Craig

[The_Sage]

Rewrites are generally regarded as the best way to handle this kind of redirect, but your DNS provider likely has their own redirect system in place that can implement the same functionality without modifying your site's .htaccess. Same result, different technique.

The reason I use my DNS with a "www" subdomain record to forward to my non-www domain is because WordPress sometimes has issues with using RewriteRule. It seems to break permalinks. I always just set it once with my DNS host and never think about it again.