I've searched quite a bit and can't seem to find a straight, modern answer on this.
If I am hosting a domain, say, mydomain.com, on a machine which is going to solely be used for that domain, and there are no subdomains, is there a real, practical reason besides compliance to create an arbitrary hostname (i.e. myhost) just in order to have a three-part FQDN (myhost.mydomain.com) to satisfy some sort of RFC or convention that's expected.
This seems to make a lot of undue complexities from my perspective, and I'm not sure if there's an advantage to this or if it's just a hold-over from a time where all web resources came from a subdomains such as www and ftp which may need to scale to separate machines.
I don't use www on my domain, either, which is ill-advised for all I know from an administrators perspective (though removing it is the norm from a designer's perspective)...