The Internet is quite a populated platform. The recent worldwide internet statistics show that there are a whopping 3,9 billion users using the internet on a daily basis.
While it is indeed a large number, this traffic surfs the internet seamlessly. The interconnected network (Internet) consists of a number of servers to handle such a large network.
When Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented the World Wide Web (www), they considered persuading a small population. The growing popularity of the world wide web meant that there would be growing numbers surfing the internet on a daily basis.
What Does www2 or www3 Mean?
Every day, such a huge number of people caused the websites to crash. From there, they found that having a subdomain is a necessity to compensate for this excessive traffic.
The subdomain is primarily an Internet domain which is a part of the primary domain name. They may call these subdomains; www2. or www3. and serve them from another server in the network pool.
In the world, constructive and destructive elements go hand in hand. While constructive elements try to build a better place, destructive elements tend to find loopholes in them.
How Does It Work?
In the same way, when the developers of the world wide web tried to make the system better, hackers found loopholes in it. In order to counter these loopholes, the subdomains were used.
The subdomains are identified as a set of closely related websites with a domain. The main functions for theses subdomains were primarily integrated for load balancing. Recently, numerous huge websites have used these extra sets of servers with subdomains for specially regulated functions.
These functions may be loading stock images and the graphic resources from another server (image.domain.com) to save the main solutions and avoid any third-party interference.
The numbers behind the www refer to different elements of a ‘server farm’. Although all of these elements contain the same information, a request of a user to visit (www.abc.com) may be internally routed to any of ABC’s available web servers (www2, www3, www4, ..etc).
The ‘abc.com’ is thus at liberty to perform load balancing when a user visits their web page. So, an initial request for ‘www’ by the user may be redirected to a less busy server such as (www3).
Conclusion:
Any website with huge daily traffic may opt to have more servers for these subdomains. Some of the larger websites are known to have up to 17 servers at once ranging from www, www1, all the way up to www15.
These servers effectively balance the traffic load throughout their server farm. One of the largest websites, Google has divided its network based on the locations of users.
Each location has a different set of domains and subdomains. Google has an estimated 900,000 servers worldwide which manage traffic of over 3.5 billion searches each day.
