As a curiosity, I checked real http headers for afternic.com typed without www, without httpS in a browser that did not visit afternic before.
The results /relevant part/ are the following:
(begin)
http://afternic.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: afternic.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 23:10:21 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.27 (CentOS)
Location:
http://www.afternic.com/
Content-Length: 310
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Set-Cookie: AFTERNICSERVERID=www01; path=/
Cache-Control: private
(end)
Two issues are obvious:
The system forwarded my request to
www.afternic.com (fine) but without httpS (the problem)
Of course one can manually type httpS and it will work. But it is not how the things are normally configured (or supposed to be configured).
Also, the server is using outdated software. Apache 2.2.x is already retired, and the latest version of this serie is 2.2.34 dated 2017-07-11. Current version is 2.4.29 !
The version used by afternic (2.2.27) is outdated.