Thread: The prefixes

You generally type in www but what about ww3 and ww2 etc?

Anyone know what those are about?

Where have you seen those recently?

Years ago, Google used ww2.google.com and ww3.google.com as test domains for deploying new indexes.

IBM uses those a lot. I'll post a few when I see them

EDIT

This one is reaaaalllly odd...

http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/automotive/us/index.html?cm_re=masthead-_-business-_-ind-auto

I've seen it on Microsoft's website when you go to download something it shoved me in a ww3

i've noticed a bunch of online banks use them too..i guess their IT guys just figured its easier creating ww* subdomains than something actually useful/memorable

Some larger websites are hosted on several server clusters with network load balancer(s) in front of them. Using ww* allows each cluster to have a unique host name but and be addressable to the load balancer and yet remain recognizable for the end user. IBM and HP still use these systems and even Microsoft is still using it in some of their data centers.

The company I used to work for also used them for load balancing. That is probably fairly common.

Its usually companies that use. I have seen my isp use them

www1.sympatico.ca and whatever. I don't think we can get them for general sites.

I actually have never seen those. Maybe I'm blind, or then I just don't pay any attention to them.