What is the meaning of www1, www2 so on?

Author : Piyush Gupta

Its a technique for load balancing when you have multiple web servers so you called them www1, www2, etc because you can't set up multiple web servers on the same domain name and name them all www because then there would be no way to tell which server to access.

Once you get to the domain or sub-domain you can then have one or more computers hosting that domain or sub-domain. Each of these computers has a machine name and where there is only one the machine name of www is usually used. Where a machine name is left off of the front of the domain or sub-domain name the default machine name of www is usually assumed so that the person will still reach the right computer to access the site.

When a site uses more than one computer for hosting then each computer needs to be given a different machine name and often www1, www2 etc are what gets used.

Example: If web site at www.examplesite.com the top level domain is .com, my domain name is examplesite, the machine name (which can be omitted) is www and it uses Hyper-text Transfer Protocol to access it. While I do have several sub-domains within my domain I do not have one called www and if I did then you would be able to access it at www.www.examplesite.com.