Explanation and differences between www and www2, www3, etc.

by: Revengsky Joseph D. Reyes (a.k.a. rjdreyes – jcyberinux.com)

Yesterday, I browse on a certain website, and I noticed that the “www.” prefix web address has been changed to “www2.” and other website www3. I thought, I being redirected on the other websites or someone may try to hack my computer. Within a complete paranoid, I immediately boot up my firewall, and suddenly I realized, I was a fool. ^_^ What a heck I said, it still the the same website.

Frankly, I immediately research on the www2 or www3 means. Well, thanks to mass media and digital information on the internet. Just search on google or wikipedia to know this sort of stuff.

We know that www stands for world wide web, a prefix on any domain name. The explanation about the www2 or www3, they built in such a way of hostnames or subdomains.

A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain, the only domain that is not also a subdomain is the root domain. For example, mail.example.com and calendar.example.com are subdomains of the example.com domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the com top-level domain (TLD).Typically used to identify a series of closely related websites within a domain, such as www.example.org, www2.example.org, and www3.example.org. – Wikipedia

So therefore, they can be tons of them in certain domain, can continued in a series, (www4, www5, www6, etc…) Another functionality, on other websites, they used mirrors for server load balancing. For example when a client request for initial “www.” on the certain server, it may get redirected to a less or low traffic server, such as “www2” or “www3”. In other reasons, while the certain server www. is in maintenance, the client may redirected to point www2. or www3 (duplication mainframe).

Another reason is certain purpose or role. Such examples can be seen on Wikipedia, notice the en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org, these two are both hosted at wikipedia.org. It tells you that en. – English Wikipedia and de. – German Wikipedia.

I hope this helps you out 🙂

Related Entries / References :

Wikipedia.org Official Site

About www2 at Wikipedia.org Official Site

About Subdomain at Wikipedia.org Official Site