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Possible Duplicate:
What does wwws mean?

Today I got one link from my friend that starts with www2.zzzzzzzz.co something like that

what is difference between www1, www2 and www3 in url

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2 Answers2

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Web farms and load balancing

Names like www1, www2, www3 are often used for members of a load-balancing farm of web-servers for popular web-sites where the workload is too much for a single server or where multiple servers are used to proivide continuity of service in the event of failure of a single server.

An example of how it works

A front-end server at www.example.com initially receives the requests and redirects the browser to an available server in the farm, it does so by returning a HTTP redirect response to the browser, the browser then retries it's request using the redirected URL provided.

It's just a name

It may just be that some parts of a large website are handled by different servers and rather than naming the servers shop.example.com shareholder.example.com jobs.example.com they name them www1.example.com www2.example.com etc.

RedGrittyBrick
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They're just sub-domains. Once upon a time sub-domains used to give a clue to the protocol used (e.g. ftp, gopher, smtp etc.) but today sub-domains are (mainly) just used to route traffic to a specific IP address.

snowdude
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