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Posted by Neo Geshel on 12/31/05 18:32
Benjamin Niemann wrote:
> Jose wrote:
>>What is the purpose of the common www prefix for websites, and what does
>>www2 mean?
> 'www' is just a convention that has been established in the early days of
> the WWW. You can use any name as the subdomain part or none at all.
> Names like www2 are sometimes used when there are more than one machine
> hosting a website (load-balancing - you'll only have to worry about such
> things, if you have to host a high-traffic site).
This is not entirely true. Load-balancing involves work done at the DNS
and server level, not at the subdomain level. With Load-Balancing, you
could have 100 servers handling requests from web surfers, but you would
not notice any difference between them in terms of the domain name.
Usually any usage of “www2” or the like is usually the result of a lack
of creativity *somewhere* in the chain of responsibility for setting up
a subdomain. Subdomains are supposed to provide the ability to set up
different “sub-sites” that are tightly related to a main, central site
(“www”), and as such, should be named accordingly (“extranet.domain.com”
for a company extranet, “ftp.domain.com” for a public FTP store,
“mail.domain.com” for e-mail servers, etc., etc.).
FYI, load balancing involves setting a domain name to point to multiple
IP addresses. Each server that has one of the IP addresses runs not only
the web server, but also load-balancing software. This software creates
a network between the servers that emulates one large, super-powerful
server, so that if a visitor uses one server, and that server gets
overloaded, the visitor can be transparently switched over to another
server without the visitor ever knowing that it occurred. The
load-balancing software ensures that the user's session with the one
server is transported across the entire network of load-balanced
servers, so that any one of them can pick up that user transparently if
the first server gets overloaded.
>>What is the difference between a site like www.mysite.com
>>and mysite.com?
> These are different domainnames and could be used to host different sites -
> but usually both names point to the same site.
>
> If you care about your search engine ranking, you should only use one name
> for your site - either www.example.org or example.org, whatever you prefer
> (and configure the 'unused' domain to redirect to the 'official' domain).
Using just “domain.com” is bad form. The whole point of a subdomain is
to specify a service under the umbrella of the domain name. “www”
specifies a web site. “ftp” specifies a public ftp store. And so on.
When you use just a domain name “http://domain.com”, you have to do
extra work on the DNS side to ensure that any such request gets routed
properly. My first host (and any of the major web hosts before 1998 or
so) never set up “domain.com” to point anywhere; a user *had* to enter
“www.domain.com” to get to any of the sites that I had hosted with them,
and getting them to point “domain.com” to an actual web site cost extra
because it was an extra DNS entry that had to be maintained.
This changed once the vast legions of unwashed newbies flooded the
Internet, and became befuddled when “domain.com” came back “page not
found”, even though “http://www.domain.com” was clearly printed on all
of a company’s stationary.
I hope this helps.
...Geshel
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