Why Do Some Websites Start With WWW1(Not WWW)

Why Do Some Websites Start With WWW1(Not WWW)

• What is WWW Anyway?
• Why Sites Still Show WWW
• New TLDs
• Why WWW1, WWW2, etc

www the beginning of every website or at least most of the time and these days web browsers usually hide that part anyway but if you click on it you can still reveal it but if you've been around the block a few times you may have occasionally come across websites that don't start with www but rather something like www one or two or even three or something else what is the deal with those why don't they start with www why do they do what they do

What is WWW Anyway?

• So to understand what's going on first let me quickly go over what exactly is www why do you see it at the beginning of every website or most of them and really it turns out that www is just a regular old sub domain like you might see for mail.google.com or blog.example.com subdomains may be used like that to differentiate between different parts of the website like the blog versus the main website or it might be used to distinguish different
• Types of internet services on that server so ftp.example.com would be what you use to connect to the ftp part of the server whereas if you just go on the regular example.com the web browser uses that and www is actually just a regular subdomain just like those examples it's not a special subdomain of any kind you can add www if you want or not just as a regular dns record like you would for adding any other type of sub domain to your website and actually the whole www thing started kind of as an accident you see one of the first websites out there was for the cern laboratories and basically they wanted to create a couple different pages
• The main info page it was meant to be info.cern.ch and they were also going to create another one for the world wide web project which was www.cern.ch apparently though these dns records were switched somehow so if you wanted to go to the main website you just go to www.cern.ch and they never really bothered fixing it or at least by the time they did fix it it was so popular that other websites actually started using www in front of them nowadays though especially it doesn't matter what you type in a website can choose to either use www or not you can type in either one and then the website will just redirect to accommodate whatever a user wants to do and a lot of times though you can choose whether or not to have the naked domain redirect to the www version a lot of websites do that even if you just have to type in google.com it might redirect to www.google.com and you might think what's the point of that if it's hidden in the web browser anyway why even have that

Why Sites Still Show WWW

• well it turns out for larger websites at least with a lot of traffic it is beneficial to have the www sub-domain now i'm going to explain why as simply as i can but it is probably going to be very technical if you don't know what i'm talking about don't worry about it but basically a naked domain so just example.com when you go to set a dns record which is basically telling the browser what ip address to go to on the internet to actually access the website the naked domain can only use what's called an a record which basically means this domain is assigned to this ip address which corresponds to a specific server subdomains however can have either a records which redirect to a specific ip address and therefore a specific server or they can have what's called a cname dns record which means it doesn't have to just be an ip address it redirects to but it can actually redirect to another domain or subdomain this can be beneficial because it can allow a lot more flexibility to whoever is running the server that you're pointing to so say for example you're using amazon web services to host your website and you're given a specific server that you want to redirect your website to and it's hosted on that server if you use an a record it's going to point to a specific ip address specifically to that server it's fine it'll work until potentially there is maybe an overload on the server
• The server goes down for whatever reason then you would have to go into your own websites dns records fix it assign it to a different server and amazon can't really do anything about it they're not going to switch the ip address of all the servers around just so your website now is redirected to one that works instead what you could do is set your dns record on the website to a cname such as server1.aws.com in this way amazon can detect oh no the original server we were using is down so now we'll just change server1.aws.com to redirect to a backup server and that way you don't actually have to do anything your website will automatically because amazon is managing this presumably amazon will handle the switching and they don't have to change eip addresses around they just change where that name points to so basically if you run a big website that may potentially require some load balancing having a www is the sub domain the main website makes it a lot easier to automatically have the servers rebalance and redirect all the traffic around and it's not so simple to do that if you have a naked domain besides

New TLDs

• just the technical reasons for website owners i do actually think www has some benefits to regular users as well especially because nowadays there are so many more top level domains before originally you probably know it was always.com.net.org maybe the occasional.gov or maybe one for your specific country but these days there are way more in fact there were over 1500 top level domains and some of these are really weird it's like dot movie.delivery.today.earth.download and even major companies have bought up their own top-level domain with their company name for example fedex ferrari lamborghini panasonic sony microsoft way more these are all top level domains now if you want to look at the full list you can view it on the iana website that's the internet assigned numbers authority i'll put the link in the description they just have a list of all of them on their site so i will point out that for the company top level domains those companies definitely have control over that so it's not like you can just go out and buy a dot microsoft domain name they obviously would not allow that but anyway my point is if you or a company buys one of these weird unusual top-level domains say they go to put their site on a billboard maybe microsoft says visit us at cloud.microsoft you're like wait a minute what is that is that a website and someone who doesn't know about these weird top-level domains might not understand what it is is that like in instagram or social media handle that they just forgot to put the at on or something but if you put www.cloud.microsoft it makes it much more obvious or at least hints towards that it is actually definitely a website and not just some weird i don't know

Why WWW1, WWW2, etc

• branding name but now that we know what www is we can go back to the main topic the video why do some websites not use www but rather ww number or whatever one example i came across which kind of inspired this video is when i was trying to go on the website wolfram alpha which is a super useful website by the way and i accidentally mistyped it as wolfam alpha.com turns out that domain is also owned by the wolfram alpha company so they probably just bought it because it was a typo but i noticed when i looked at it that it was weirdly showing ww25 that wolffam alpha.com i was like what's up with that and there are other websites out there that are accessible not with www but for example www.citibank.com.a u that's the australia version of citibank that's accessible and that doesn't use www well like i said earlier in the video www is not a special sub domain of any kind it's arbitrary if you wanted you could have your website redirect to the main page being zzz.example.com or whatever you want it doesn't even have to be three letters it could be mainpage.whatever.com anything but if you did do that it might confuse people and most people know www so that's just what every website uses but if you go on the website and it says www.whatever.com there may be a couple reasons for it first of all it could be basically the backup server so for example it could be used for load balancing where if the main www server is down then it could be set to redirect to whatever the ww2 server is however it's not really an elegant way because we already kind of came up with the thought that well if you use www then it can already redirect sort of to a different server so there is technically a way you can do it using different www subdomains it's just not very elegant and it's more obvious to the user that something is going on in the background but basically most of the time if you do see ww2 or another number it probably is a backup server that you're accessing now with my wolfram alpha example you may be wondering wait a minute why does that extra domain that's just a typo have ww25 surely that does not need a backup if it's a typo domain there can't be that many people accessing it to require backup and that is actually something i'm kind of curious about if i go on the main actual from alpha.com if i type in ww25 which is the same as the typo1 that's not a valid subdomain but www 25 is and most other numbers actually are if i go through 1 through 99 basically all of those are valid subdomains there are a couple exceptions like www 2 and ww4 for some reason but if you go to basically any of the other numbers it does redirect to the main website and actually if we were to ping www.3.wolframalpha.com you can actually see it has a different ip than the main www subdomain with other of the www sub domains though it does also just redirect back to the main domain so clearly some of these sub domains have another server which might be a backup and i don't know how it's arranged on the back end
• but i'm assuming these are all just backup domains in case it's needed so that is an example of at least some of those subdomains showing probably being for a backup server now why does wolfm alpha.com have ww25 as the main subdomain well i don't know maybe it's set to be on the 25th backup which kind of would make sense it's like put it on a server that doesn't really need any usage most of the time or maybe it's just completely random and no one really cared when they were setting up because it's a random typo domain or something like that but in any case hopefully now you've seen some examples you know why you might come across a weird sub domain it's not really anything special it's just kind of like a backup potentially or just a design choice so hopefully you