What is www1., www2. ?

[sandy007]

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hi,

Can anyone please clarify the difference between

www.sitename.com
&
www1.sitename.com
www2.sitename.com etc.

what is the difference between www1. or www2.

advance thanks.

[axod]

Depends on the site.
You could make your DNS setup to have different sites on each. You could have a different website on http://this.is.my.homepage.sitename.com if you really wanted.
The fact that most websites use 'www.' is quite arbitrary. There's even been calls in the past to get rid of it. It's definately handy to make sure that http://sitename.com either redirects to http://www.sitename.com or just serves up the same content.

If the webservers are behind a load balancer, then it may be that www.sitename.com points to the loadbalancer, and www1. www2. www3. etc are the individual web servers behind it.

[Harry smith]

Hi Axod,
Can you please explain me when to use www1.sitename.com and www2.sitename.com
Is there any specific reason behind using it.

[montyauto]

Hi Axod,
Can you please explain me when to use www1.sitename.com and www2.sitename.com
Is there any specific reason behind using it.

I would try to help to explain as simple as possible as below:

the main site should be :
www.sitename.com

subdomain can be:
www1.sitename.com or
www2.sitename.com or
whatever.sitename.com but www.sitename.com
which can be pointed your subfolder under your root folder or to whatever ip in the world..

if you still cannot get it, i would suggest type 'subdomain' in any search engine and take the info from the results..

[monk-i]

The only issue I see with load balancing though is how to handle the search engine bots so that they don't treat them as seperate but thats very hard as far as I can see.

The reason for load balancing is if you have an EXTREMELY busy website which is making some clients get the dreaded 404 or very slow pages then you use the load balancer to go right ive sent so many to server 1 so i'll send this client to server 2 making sure everyone gets a good smooth experience. After all a server can only handle so many users any above and it just fails and thats a waste and possibly a client you can never retrieve if your brand isn't strong enough.