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Does it mean that user requests directing to the different servers?

I usually see it on websites with high traffic.

for eg:- https://www.tcs.com/

      https://www2.deloitte.com/
etrupja
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Still Questioning
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  • I don't see what this has to do with programming. – John Saunders Jan 01 '11 at 21:43
  • [A serverfault link](https://serverfault.com/questions/122242/how-to-deploy-a-site-with-www2-or-www3-prefix-load-balancing) feels particularly useful for explaining technical details behind the concept. – D A Dec 03 '21 at 16:13

3 Answers3

15

This is largely speculative, but generally each of the www'n's is simply a different web server, which a given user has been routed to either manually (for example all images might live on www2, etc.) or by some form of up-stream round robin system or load-balancer, both of which tend to use some component of the end user's IP address or similar to ensure that a user's session will remain on a given server.

Incidentally, more modern implementations will hide the existence of multiple servers behind a single 'www', so that this is less visible/intrusive.

John Parker
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8

It doesn’t technically mean anything in particular — domains read right-to-left, so for everything to the left of a company’s domain, it’s up to the company what each bit means. (“www”, for example, is just a conventional subdomain for the web site of the company.)

I‘ve no personal experience of what www1, www2 et al are commonly used for in practice. It might well be different servers, although to my mind that’s exposing implementation details at the interface level, and is thus a bad idea.

Paul D. Waite
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  • FirsDirect bank use this prefix... which worries me if it is insecure or opens them up to risk – Paul C Nov 27 '14 at 11:46
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    @CodeBlend: no domain prefix has any particular technical significance, so you’ve got nothing to worry about purely because you see “www1” (or anything else) at the start of a domain. – Paul D. Waite Nov 27 '14 at 19:09
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As an example, PHP's website (at least for documentation) will forward requests to different subdomains. For example, if I go to php.net/echo, I am directed to either us2.php.net or us3.php.net. For the PHP website, it does appear that each subdomain represents a different server, but this is not necessarily the case.

Kyle
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