ww3?

Factual Questions
1

Hiya

As I understood it, www and ftp and mail, when used as a prefix with a domain name are “services”, and http://, ftp://, gopher:// and so on are protocols to use these services.

So where does ww3 fit in? It’s not a subdomain, cos www.ww3.hostname.com does not work…?

confused

abby

2

Here I thought someone was asking about the possibility of World War III starting (and promptly getting moved to Great Debates), but alas…

FWIW, I’ve only noticed the ww3 on secure sites once past the front door of a site. IANAProgrammer, so I really have no idea if this is anywhere close, but it’s my WAG.

3

mods, pilot has a good point - could you please retitle this thread

“ww3” - protocol, service, or what? confused

Thanks!

abby

4

ww3 in what sense?

Do you mean in the sense that you’re accessing a server called ww3.somehost.com, or that your browser shows ww3://www.somehost.com in the address bar?

Servers can have any name. If I own the somehost.com domain, I can set up servers called, say, www, ww1, ww2, and ww3, and host services on those servers. They’d then be accessed by the full addresses www.somehost.com, ww1.somehost.com, and so on. Each server could host any service: I could, for example, host an ftp server on www.somehost.com. You’d access it as ftp://www.somehost.com. I could even host multiple services on one named server. If this is what you’re asking about, ww3.somehost.com is simply a named server that could be serving any protocol.

In the second case, ww3://www.somehost.com, I have no idea. Never seen it. But I’m not omniscient, so maybe there’s a ww3 service and that’s what you’re asking about.

Does that help, or am I explaining something completely different?

5

Hiya stypticus

Thanks for the info. Sorry, i shoulda been clearer. I mean addresses in the form http://ww3.mydomain.com.

Thanks for clearing that up!

abby

6

The “ww3” in that example means nothing. The xxx.yyy.zzz part is the network name assigned to the computer that acts as a web server. It’s common to call the web server ‘www’, but it’s not necessary at all. You need not look further than the Straight Dope site for an example - the server that handles Cecil’s columns is called “www” in the domain “straightdope.com”, so the full name of the computer is “www.straightdope.com”. But the message board is hosted on a separate server called “boards,” so if you look at the top of this window, you notice the address is “boards.straightdope.com”.

7

What scr4 said, with the addition that the word for this is “subdomain”, and its typical use is as a method of load balancing-- spreading different parts of a large website over several servers.

8

Actually, I think the word is “hostname.” As I understand it, the subdomain is an extra layer in the hierarchy which not all addresses have. For example, the web server of my group is solarwww.mtk.nao.ac.jp. The nao.ac.jp is the domain owned by our university, and mtk is a subdomain which is assigned to our campus. solarwww is the hostname of our web server. (I used to share a room with it, in fact - it’s just a workstation.)