|
|
Posted by Benjamin Niemann on 01/02/06 16:20
Neo Geshel wrote:
> Benjamin Niemann wrote:
>> Jose wrote:
>> 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.
I did not claim, that this is *the* way to implement load balancing. There
are many ways to implement load-balancing, including round-robin DNS
setups, reverse proxies etc.
Redirecting users to one of various hosts (sometimes called 'wwwX') is a
very simple, rather inefficient, but sometimes sufficient kind of
load-balancing.
> 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.).
>
> [snip description of DNS based load-balancing]
>>>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.
>
> 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.
This was the original intention of the subdomain concept. But today there is
no real reason for this. Sites are either hosted in a much simpler
configuration - a single server doing 'everything', and there is no point
in giving different names to the same server. And large sites use a much
more sophisticated setup than 'one www, one ftp and one mail server'.
IMHO subdomain should today used to devide the services by content and not
by the used protocol - the URI scheme should be used to specify the
protocol, not the subdomain (which it wouldn't do anyway).
And (again IMHO) using 'example.com' as the primary portal for a domain is
valid approach (and supporting www.example.com only as a legacy alias).
Though I personally prefer 'www.example.com' over 'example.com' - but I
think it's just a matter of personal preference today.
--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://www.odahoda.de/
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|