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Recently while scrolling around the internet I've found a few websites that have w2 at the beginning of the URL instead of www. I'm not really sure of what the purpose of using this form of canonicalization may serve, other than just to be different. But after seeing that the Vatican's website also has it now, I'm starting to think it may actually have a functional purpose.

The Vatican's website has a lot of interesting redirects, but for me at least they all end up going back to w2.vatican.va as the base URL.

www.vatican.va redirects back there, google redirects there although it was indexed with the www.

So what is the purpose of using w2 instead of www?

Joshua Strot
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1 Answers1

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The w2 is a subdomain, just as www is actually a subdomain. vatican.va is the top-level domain.

There are many uses for subdomains that usually come at the discretion of the developers, engineers, or administrators of a web site.

This is why sometimes you will see websites without the www (e.g. https://example.com). They have chosen to exclude the www subdomain. Most will pick one version to be their canonical and redirect the other to it.

In the example you provided, they chose to make their primary subdomain w2.vatican.va at some point and are redirecting (likely older) links from the www.vatican.va to the new one.

Additionally, the w2 domain may indicate that the web server is using IBM's CICS Transaction Server. The w2 may be it's default listener and the server administrators did not choose to change it.

Michael Irigoyen
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