Www follows with different numbers such as www1, www2, www3 etc. - what is it?

Question

Does this mean (for example, on the Apaches website) that the server is sending a request to different servers? I usually see this on high traffic sites.

Answer 1

This is mostly speculative, but, as a rule, each of www'n is just a different web server that this user was redirected either manually (for example, all images can be displayed on www2, etc.), or in some either in the form of an advanced flow system or a load balancing system, each of which tends to use some component of the end user's IP address or similar, to ensure that the user session remains on the given server.

By the way, more modern implementations will hide the existence of several servers behind a single "www", so this will be less visible / intrusive.

Answer 2

This does not mean, in particular, something special - the domains are read from right to left, so for everything that is to the left of the companys domain, it depends on the company, which means every bit. (for example, "www" is just a common subdomain for a company website.)

I have no personal experience that www1, www2, etc. are commonly used in practice. Perhaps these are different servers, although, in my opinion, they display implementation details at the interface level and, therefore, are bad ideas.

Answer 3

As an example, a PHP website (at least for documentation) will redirect requests to different subdomains. For example, if I go to php.net/echo , I am redirected to us2.php.net or us3.php.net. For the PHP website, it seems that each subdomain is a different server, but this is not necessarily the case.