What is WWW2?
Have you been to a website whose name appears in the form "www2.something.com?" It happens more often these days, so I wondered exactly what that meant.
To understand that, you need a quick primer on URLs.
URL means Uniform Resource Locator, indicating that this is a form of addressing any kind of resource on the internet in a way understood by all kinds of different computers and operating systems.
The parts of a URL are : protocol:(//)subdomain.domain.suffix
- protocol
http:// (for hypertext, the main web-format)
ftp:// (for file transfers, one at a time)
mailto: (for sending email)
file:// (for opening a local file on your computer)
wais, gopher etc. are hardly useful anymore
- suffix
.com (commercial)
.gov (government site)
.mil (military)
.edu (educational)
.net (network)
.org (non-profit organization)
.us (United States)
.uk (United Kingdom)
.jp (Japan)
etc. (two-letter abbreviations to indicate the country)
- domain
uic.edu
netscape.com
arthritis.org
- subdomain
www.name.com
www2.name2.com
The www or www2 portion of the URL refers to the host. Thus, www.name.com and www2.name.com would be related (or even the same) site, split between two different servers.
As explained by www.practicalcommerce.com:
"Occasionally you will see a website that starts with “www2” rather than “www.” However, the “www2” has no real significance other than being a subdomain. Developers will often use subdomains such as “www2” or “www3” to accommodate overflow sections of large websites or to segment larger sites into more manageable subdomains.
Subdomains are smaller sections of a main domain. For example, you might have a website at www.examplesite.com that has a community forum. This forum could be housed at a subdomain called forum.examplesite. com, which represents a subdomain. This type of subdomain uses the DNS system to point requests to forum.example.com to a particular directory of the top-level domain. In the case of websites that display as www2.examplesite.com, the developers have simply named their subdomain “www2,” and it is no different than the forum.examplesite.com sub domain."
Have you been to a website whose name appears in the form "www2.something.com?" It happens more often these days, so I wondered exactly what that meant.
To understand that, you need a quick primer on URLs.
URL means Uniform Resource Locator, indicating that this is a form of addressing any kind of resource on the internet in a way understood by all kinds of different computers and operating systems.
The parts of a URL are : protocol:(//)subdomain.domain.suffix
- protocol
http:// (for hypertext, the main web-format)
ftp:// (for file transfers, one at a time)
mailto: (for sending email)
file:// (for opening a local file on your computer)
wais, gopher etc. are hardly useful anymore
- suffix
.com (commercial)
.gov (government site)
.mil (military)
.edu (educational)
.net (network)
.org (non-profit organization)
.us (United States)
.uk (United Kingdom)
.jp (Japan)
etc. (two-letter abbreviations to indicate the country)
- domain
uic.edu
netscape.com
arthritis.org
- subdomain
www.name.com
www2.name2.com
The www or www2 portion of the URL refers to the host. Thus, www.name.com and www2.name.com would be related (or even the same) site, split between two different servers.
As explained by www.practicalcommerce.com:
"Occasionally you will see a website that starts with “www2” rather than “www.” However, the “www2” has no real significance other than being a subdomain. Developers will often use subdomains such as “www2” or “www3” to accommodate overflow sections of large websites or to segment larger sites into more manageable subdomains.
Subdomains are smaller sections of a main domain. For example, you might have a website at www.examplesite.com that has a community forum. This forum could be housed at a subdomain called forum.examplesite. com, which represents a subdomain. This type of subdomain uses the DNS system to point requests to forum.example.com to a particular directory of the top-level domain. In the case of websites that display as www2.examplesite.com, the developers have simply named their subdomain “www2,” and it is no different than the forum.examplesite.com sub domain."
Comments