Why do some urls have ww2 instead of www?

[Theb]

It's much less common than seeing www, but I've seen it quite a few times so it must be something that quite a few admins do. What is it's purpose?

 

[Goosemaster]

they are just subdomains.

 

[bluestrobe]

It?s due to the fact they are running out of domain names and made a another level at which they could create domain names. www.meme.com and www2.meme.com are two different domain and/or websites.

 

[Nothinman]

The way DNS works is that the first part of the DNS name is the server name, so when you specify www.microsoft.com you're telling your web browser to connect to host www in the microsoft.com domain. Usually when you see www2 or ww2 it's indicating that the host is part of a server farm, usually there's several www#.blah.com addresses and you just happened to get the number 2. You type in www.blah.com and the load balancer at the front end redirects you one of X amount of web servers behind it, most sites are good about hiding this fact and making all web servers present themself as www, but some either don't care or don't know how.

 

[bluestrobe]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The way DNS works is that the first part of the DNS name is the server name, so when you specify www.microsoft.com you're telling your web browser to connect to host www in the microsoft.com domain. Usually when you see www2 or ww2 it's indicating that the host is part of a server farm, usually there's several www#.blah.com addresses and you just happened to get the number 2. You type in www.blah.com and the load balancer at the front end redirects you one of X amount of web servers behind it, most sites are good about hiding this fact and making all web servers present themself as www, but some either don't care or don't know how.

Interesting. The info I got was wrong then.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The way DNS works is that the first part of the DNS name is the server name, so when you specify www.microsoft.com you're telling your web browser to connect to host www in the microsoft.com domain. Usually when you see www2 or ww2 it's indicating that the host is part of a server farm, usually there's several www#.blah.com addresses and you just happened to get the number 2. You type in www.blah.com and the load balancer at the front end redirects you one of X amount of web servers behind it, most sites are good about hiding this fact and making all web servers present themself as www, but some either don't care or don't know how.

Yup, it's mostly loadbalancing across multiple servers for large sites.

 

[Nothinman]

Interesting. The info I got was wrong then.

Well www.meme.com and www2.meme.com could be two different domains, it depends on how they have it setup. AFAIK there's no real limitations on how many levels deep a domain name can be. But most likely if they really were different domains and not just different hosts, you would be accessing them via something.www.meme.com and something.www2.meme.com since you need to specify a hostname for connections and not a domain name.

 

[RebateMonger]

www2.meme.com could mean one of two things:

1) www2.meme.com is at a different public IP address than www.meme.com
2) www2.meme.com is at a server with a private IP address within the meme.com domain and the "www2" part tells the public-facing server where to route the requests to reach the hidden internal server.

 

[alfa147x]

So when you buy a domain you get all of the www#'s ?
or
are they a completly other sale?

-thanks

 

[RebateMonger]

A Domain name consists of xxxx.xxx
ANYTHING that ends in xxxx.xxx belongs to you.
i.e. www.www.www.www.www.xxxx.xxx belongs to you.

 

[JackMDS]

At this point the tradional Oy Vey ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oy_vey ) would be aproprieate.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/117/css_persistence_http.html

:sun:

 

[spidey07]

It is just another host name that maps to yet another IP address.

Usually done to redirect things to a different set of infrastructure for security reasons.

Most times big farms are fronted by content/layer7 switches that distribute the load to a pool of front end servers. This infrastructure has it's own set of rules for security. There may be another farm that is more secure and the architecht wants a different traffic flow. This is done by using a different IP address and hence a different host name.

www. is just a host name. Nothing special about it. It may as well be omghi2u.

Larger farms will then be geographically diverse and you'll get multiple IP addresses for a single host.

 

[Nothinman]

So when you buy a domain you get all of the www#'s ?
or
are they a completly other sale?

The www#s are just arbitrary names, you could call it http.domain.com or beta.domain.com or bob.domain.com and they would all work just fine, the only reason people consistently use www.domain.com is because it's what people are used to using.

When you buy a domain you get complete control over it and any hosts using names in that domain. So if you buy domain.com you can put anything in front of domain.com. If you buy subdomain.domain.com you get to use anything.subdomain.domain.com.

 

[JackMDS]

LOL, it is still going :shocked:

That means that ftp.xyz.com and <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="https://xyz.com"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="https://xyz.com">https://xyz.com</a></a> belong to the same domain.

As well as jack.xyz.com and jill.xyz.com

It might be that the owner of xyz.com is willing to rent you space on his server and let you use http://sucker.xyz.com but the domain still belong to who ever owns xyz.com

And No, you can no buy ww9.xyz.com for yourself.

:sun:

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
LOL.

That means that ftp.xyz.com and <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="https://xyz.com">https://xyz.com</a> belong to the same domain.

As well as jack.xyz.com and jill.xyz.com

well, they do.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: spidey07
well, they do.

:brokenheart: :evil: :thumbsup:

:sun: