www2 and wwwi etc...

Evening all,

Just a really quick question regarding www2 etc...

Ytake a glance at the Firewall.cx URL and you can easily see the www prefix in the URL, however I have seen sites around with other prefixes such as www2 and wwwi, examples are:

- wwwi.reuters.com
- www2.imagiware.com

I was just wondering what these meant. It's been bugging me for a while now, but no one seems to have the answer. Also, how would I go about obtaining one of these?

Thanks in advance. Adam.

I am not sure what the standards are regarding their use but it is simply a dns record. Like the following URL's:

images.google.com/
froogle.google.com/
news.google.com/
www.firewall.cx/
firewall.cx

SLZ –

Firewall.cx, Microsoft.com, Idahojack.com, Symantec.com, etc. are all TLD’s (Top Level Domain’s), this would be called and treated as a website. WWW, FTP, WWW1, News, etc, are all “Sub-Domains”, they can be total different then the TLD’s.

Just because you have a TLD don’t really mean you have a sub-domain.
“WWW” are pointed to your TLD’s; you can have anything for a sub-domain.
As stated each sub-domain can work total independent from the TLD’s i.e.: update.microsoft.com and this also would work in conjunction with your email such as: askbill@microsoft.com, askbill@update.microsoft.com.

And just because the whole world uses port 80 to serve a webpage that again does not really mean you have too, you could have a webpage on any 65535 ports you’d like.
However the first 1024 ports are reserved, but you could do it. The webpage Firewall.cx on port 80 may deal with firewalls but the Firewall.cx on port 2255 may deal with pretty flowers (there’s no page there, just for demo purposes).

Hope that helps muddy up the water more…I was in a hurry when I typed this up…

Good Luck,

Jack, so www, www1 are all sub domains, sorry, I've just realised that now while typing the clarification reply. Thank-you for the replies from you both, muchly appreciated.

Jack is right, I just want to note that typically firewall.cx, microsoft.com, etc are Second Level Domains, TLDs are simply com, net, org, etc since they exist on the first level just under the root (.)

But of course we can consider a domain Top Level in accordance to our administration, that is if it is the highest Level Domain in our authority.