.:: Questions Regarding www1 ::.

[tuXian]

While its heard and read a lot that www is becoming obselete and is not necessary to prefix a domain with www. On the other hand I have seen a handful of sites that have www1 and www2 prefixes.

In the above context I have the following questions:

1. What are these www1 and www2 prefixes?

2. In what way they differ from www prefix??

3. How can one add these prefixes to their domain name?

4. Are there any advantages or disadvantages by adding them??

[enoonmai]

Hmm, www1 and www2 are just different servers for the same domain. Take Google.com for instance. In a way to make access to the site efficient, one of two methods are used - virtual hosting or TCP connection hopping. All three servers (www/www1/www2) fall under the google.com domain, but depending on the amount of traffic, the load is distributed between the three servers, www, www1 and www2. Usually the content is mirrored so that the user doesnt even know that its a different server handling his request. Its just a redundancy thing and a method of load balancing for heavy volume / high traffic sites. Dont know why you'd want to use different servers for your site. No point to it unless you're planning on e-commerce or anything else high-volume.

[tuXian]

I am asking this for knowlege purpose and is going to try this out when I know about it completely.

Can someone elaborate on it more and plz also answer the questions too completely.

[enoonmai]

You're going go TRY this out? You mean, you're actually going to host your site on three servers in identical fashion just to see what www, www1 and www2 look like? Well, I already explained what the prefixes were and how they differed from the standard issue www prefix (which is sometimes known as a "masquerade" since the traffic would be directed to www1, www2, www3, www4.....wwwn servers depending on the load on the other servers) I think that takes care of questions 1 and 2. As to how to add them, well, once you have servers hosting mirrored content and you have their nameservers, I guess you have to contact your domain registrar and tell them to register the domains, the servers and nameserver records to point to your domain, and then run the server "farm" (which is the technical term) on either your own premises (which is what's usually done. Hardly any high volume site relies on external hosting) or get the special business hosting solutions from the reseller and then ask them to use load balancing on your domain. Its not a simple task of selecting options in cPanel or WHM, as far as I know. If anyone else has experience with this and thinks this is wrong, please correct me. That takes care of Question 3. As for question 4, disadvantages? Money, lots of money, as the servers have to have identical content and yet be hosted separately, plus the task of syncing the servers with updated content. Advantages? Well, if your server sees like 100,000 hits per day, then such a solution will make sure your site doesnt buckle under the load and come to a crashing stop. I think that takes care of the questions. I dont know how you're gonna "experiment" with this, seeing how much its gonna cost you.

[tuXian]

I never though it would be that costly affair anyways

I guess you have to contact your domain registrar and tell them to register the domains

1. Is it needed to purchase three diff domains for www ... www2?

2. Cant we create just create dns records for www...www2?? and have only one domain.!

[enoonmai]

Thats what I said, you just need to contact your registrar and tell them to update your records with the addresses of the new servers. They might charge you extra, no idea if they would, because they might consider it a commercial/business venture. But it just involves adding a few extra records to your domain, thats all. No buying more domains, etc. or any of that stuff.