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I was looking at this page

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/webphere-business-modeler/advanced/features/

and I noticed that a lot of IBM pages have "www-01." prefix, why is that? I thought every page had either to skip the www. prefix or use just www. Ps. there's a typo too in the page (webphere) but that doesn't matter

John Smith
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    There is no reason to use `www` as prefix. There never was. It might be easier if you have a few boxes and name the one which does ftp ftp.somename.tld, and the one which does gopher gopher.somename.tld, but that is just for easy of maintenance. – Hennes Oct 22 '12 at 15:25
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    In an environment as complex as IBM's you have a server farm with many different servers. You're confusing a protocol **http/https** with a machine fqdn **www.example.com**. The server could be called **sillyputty.example.com** and as long as it's responding to the **http/https** protocol requests, it will serve web pages. There's nothing special either about not having the **www** as all you're doing is making the machine fqdn be your domain name. – Fiasco Labs Oct 22 '12 at 15:39
  • I'm tempted to close this as "too localized" since it only applies to a single company's public website, but I do think the answers about naming standards is useful to have on this site. – mfinni Oct 22 '12 at 15:39

2 Answers2

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www. is just a sub-domain and is usually created as a CNAME to the plain domain name. There's nothing inherently special about www other than it was the unofficial standard prefix for web traffic way back in the day.

You can have it say www-i-am-awesome.ibm.com if you control the authoritative name servers for ibm.com, it really doesn't matter. www. something isn't any different than mail. or ftp. or members., for example.

MDMarra
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They might have www-02 as their DR site. Or it could be redirected based on the language of your browser, or the region of the world you're in.

Short story - you'd have to ask them, or hope that someone from IBM's web team is here on this site to give the actual answer.

mfinni
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