What is WWW2 or WWW1?
We all know that “WWW” stands for World Wide Web, which is a kind of prefix before normal domain name. Web was created around 1990 in Geneva, Switzerland. But what is WWW1 or WWW2?
You must noticed www1 or www2 once in a while when you are visiting a website. WWW1, WWW2 or even WWW3 is nothing but a mirror of the original web server which is typical WWW. Many websites like government, banks even major search engines like Google(www1.google.com or www2.google.com) and Yahoo(www1.yahoo.com or www2.yahoo.com)! uses www1 and www2. The main purpose of this techniques is to reduce server load. Sometimes the original server need to be updated or modified but major websites like .gov, .edu, google.com, yahoo.com cannot just shut their main server down for hours to update their system. Therefore, they need to use www1 or www2 duplication of their mainframe server.
Sometimes this different servers used for the serving users based on their geographical location. Suppose, if someone type www.google.com form US, they might be taken to the original google server which means www.google.com but if someone type www.google.com from Africa, it might take them to www2.google.com or www1.google.com.
I was surprised that not a lot of information showed up in Google or Yahoo when i was searching for it. If you know more about WWW2 or WWW1 please feel free to share with everyone here by adding your comment at the bottom. I was wondering if there is any security issue behind this mirror web server policy?
Jun 28th, 2007 | 11594 Views | Posted in Blogging | 10 Comments | Print
www is just hostname. You can have hostnames of your choice. So in www.yahoo.com, www is simply hostname. Yahoo could as well have foo.yahoo.com and still show you yahoo main page (as mirror). So its not necessary to name mirror (or load balance) servers as www1 or www2. You can name it whatever you want.
Thank you for your blog. its a nice article to read. I have some query regarding WWW2 or WWW1. is it just like a subdomain concept. if not how could I can do that? if you have time then please answer me or send me the reference links.
I recently created a website using freewebs.com, and when I tried to access my site, it didn’t work! It kept routing me to the main freewebs.com site. So, I added a new page to my site, was able to view it (finally) and link to the other pages of my site through it, when I noticed it said www1.mysite.com at the top of the page. What a pain, I can’t access my website by just typeing mysite.com or www.mysite.com i HAVE to type www1.mysite.com. This is really going to reduce the amount of traffic to my site, even people with the address won’t be able to access it if they don’t know to put a 1 after the www!
Will this go away eventually?
Kathy
Kathy-
I too use freewebs.com and had noticed that all of a sudden there was this www1. before my web address when I recently visited it. Now I would type in my web site as usual www.foxydoxys.com and it would go to my web site, but I noticed the “1″ after the www would appear in the address bar. I was sure my site had been stolen or something! I’ve spent the evening researching this mysterious “1″. (Which is how I got here.)
You and everyone else should still be able to get to your site by typing in www.yoursite.com You should not have to type the 1 in yourself. And yes, I believe it may revert back to normal from what I am reading. If you cannot get to your site without typing in the 1 then you need to contact freewebs.com. They usually are good about responding to the emails, though not always quickly.
Yes, I found this page after an internet search too, also because freewebs is struggling (wikipedia doesn’t mention www1 on its site). Freewebs’ www1 mirror site (as I now understand it to be) doesn’t seem very healthy to me.
I also noticed the www1 on Freewebs recently, and I can still get to my site, using my current www.mysite.com, I read about on webopedia, and it may be due to them doing some maintenance, so they transferred the load on their servers.
www.foxydoxys.com is working, and it seems to redirect to www1, automatically.
Yeah, today certain sites with paid domain name are still redirected to www1. At Freewebs they say it’s temporary and all sites will be back to www, but in the meantime Google has crawled thousands and thousands of pages and they’re now indexed as www1. According to Google, this is DUPLICATE CONTENT, and thus your website will be PENALISED in search rankings. Thanks Freewebs for being so SEO friendly! I ended having half website listed as WWW and half with WWW1.
This was the last straw, three days ago I moved to an affordable hosting and I transfered my domain from Freewebs Domains to GoDaddy. Do you know that “Freewebs Domains” charges you $19.95 a year while at GoDaddy just $9.99? And do you know that “Freewebs Domains” is just a RESELLER of Wild West Domains which, in turn, is a reseller of GoDaddy?
Freewebs problem: SEO expert says never do server load balancing! You’ve probably noticed sites whose URL will be something like http://www1.domain.com and then maybe http://www2.domain.com the next time. That’s server load balancing. Problem is, the search engines will see www, www1, www2, etc. as duplicate copies of the site. That’s asking for duplicate content problems. Actually, Now thats a big issue to consider for serious business guys!
Duplicate content is a hot, if not over discussed, topic among the search engine marketing community. In a nutshell, if you have basically the same content on more than one page, the search engines will choose the one they think is the most important and rank it and only it. If you do too much of this, you could get some demerits from the search engines. If you really overdo it with mirror sites and the like, you could get banned or at least penalized.
If this problem still continue with freewebs, dont wait for long if you are running a serious business as this will cause tremendous loss to your business, customers and empty your traffic in a week. You can move your account to a different company as there are many cheap afforable companys out there better than freewebs this days. You get a good server domain for as low as $5 this days whereas freewebs charge you $19 or something, you can use the extra few dollars for some other purpose. Whats the difference between $5 and $19 then? the difference is, freewebs is only a reseller for wild west domains! you can start selling them too like a professional
You all have a great day!
Thanks for this post. I just came across www2 for the forst time and wondered what the hell it was. As you say there is very little info about it when you put the term into search engines, and no wikipedia page entry!
Your short article answered all of my questions. Cheers.
This is the start of the collapse of the free internet.
Do some research on internet2, bilderdergers and their plans for 2010.
The major ISP’s are trying to get in a cable like system where the major sites/subdomains will be included in your internet plan but sites that are not in one of the major domains will attract a charge for bandwidth.
The military industrial complex need to control the web, free speech is hurting them too much.