What is the reason for putting www at the start of a domain name?
The www is the host name. Usually, web servers have www as the host name. It’s just a convention, though, not a rule; if you look at the address line of your browser you’ll see that this page is hosted by “boards”.
Www is the usual name for web hosts, but there are other kinds of hosts. ftp servers usually have ftp as the host name, for example.
I had a long post ready, but How Stuff Works has a better explanation than I can come up with.
Basically, it’s just a convention that makes it easy for system administrators to move services from one server to another, and makes it easy for users to know which server provides a certain service.
For example, www.hansprestige.com, ftp.hansprestige.com, and mail.hansprestige.com all refer to the same server. But if I start getting so much web traffic and so much spam that one machine can’t handle it all, I could move the web site and mail server to different computers, change the host names “www” and “mail” to refer to the new machines, and everything would keep working without anyone knowing the difference.
This reminds me of the kid who asks where he came from and the dad gives him the whole birds & bees lecture. Then he says, “Bobby came from Ohio.”
www stands for World Wide Web, which is to say the world accessible to you by HTML protocol using a web browser. As other posters said you can use any name you want but everybody just started using www for their web servers by convention.
This is kind of a drive-by shooting in the fight against ignorance, but remember that writing just “straightdope.com” instead of “www.straightdope.com” wouldn’t have made much sense to people back when the “www means web server” convention came about.
It would have been the early 90’s when that decision was made in most server admin minds, and to be honest “The World Wide Web” was not the most widely used protocol at the beginning of that period. FTP, NNTP and even GOPHER fer chrissakes were still running strong back then as protocols, as opposed to being the outdated specialty-use protocols that they are now.
and even GOPHER fer chrissakes were still running strong back then
Raise a glass to Archie!
Why, it’s for the same reason that we put “1-” in front of our area codes.
And don’t forget his girlfriend “Veronica” !
It is interesting that this convention has engendered the misconception that ‘www’ is some sort of top-level hierarchical container in which all different websites reside (i’ve come across quite a few people who thought this - I suppose it is because of directory trees - maybe they are thinking it is www/site/page).
How about www2 or www3? What is the origin of these?
If you need to set up two or three different web servers on the same domain, this is just about the most unimaginative way possible of naming them.
thats network admins for ya
Well, in all fairness it’s been a long time since I’ve actually noticed a www2 or a www3 myself.
I did it once in '96
Not everyone in the world puts “1-” in front of their area codes – only people in Region 1, i.e. Canada and the USA. People in Mexico for 52- in front of their area codes, people in the UK put 44- in front of their area codes, people in Australia put 61- in front of their area codes. The telephone world is a lot bigger than Region 1.
Actually… not web domains, but I’ve set up ftp2.mydomain.com and possibly even ftp3.mydomain.com (and maybe sql2.mydomain.com )
Wasn’t sure what else to call a second FTP server.
(Checks the DNS entries for my ckenworthy.net personal domain.)
Hmm… no ftp3, but at some time I did set up sql2.ckenworthy.net, mysql2.ckenworthy.net, and even ‘website2.ckenworthy.net’ (Didn’t have a website or a website1)
If you look up to your address bar, you’ll notice that the domain name for the SDMB doesn’t start with “www”: http://boards.straightdope.com/
As another example, the Massachusets Institute of Technology was of course one of the early pioneers of the new protocol, and they called their web server “web”. To this day, the official URL of the MIT website is http://web.mit.edu (although nowadays, apparently http://www.mit.edu will get you there, also).
I just noticed www22.verizon.com today.