Why do some websites have the designation "WWW2" ...?

Question

I'm just curious, I was doing some research into how the Coca Cola Corporation largely invented our present image of "Santa". And I noticed that their websites carry the address "WWW2".

Can anyone tell me the background to this,- is it the start of the "Internet 2" that my ( european) sons keep warning me about?


http://www2.coca-cola.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html

Answer 1

When you look at a URL like:

http://www2.coca-cola.com

The URL can be broken down into:

http:// - The protocol used (like a radio frequency)

www2 - The hostname of the server

coca-cola - The name of the Corporate Domain (maintained by the company)

.com - The Top-level Domain (Maintained by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN))


If you pay close attention to the address bar of your browser, you may catch the hostname change periodically while surfing a site. This just means that the site has several servers working in conjunction (too big to have on one host).

The only time you should worry is if you see the Corporate Domain change (like from coca-cola to cocacola). Not always a problem, but some phishers use these kinds of domain names to catch people unaware (you think you are on a legitimate site but it is actually a trap to get your personal info)

Answer 2

There's no way to say for sure if it's a different server or not. www2 is the subdomain part of the url. When you don't explicitly specify the sub-domain, the standard as I recall is to use www. Which is why you see all around you www.google.com and www.yahoo.com. They are equivalent to google.com and yahoo.com (without the www).

How a site is organized (with sub-domains, servers, and so on) is an internal matter.

There's two terms that have gotten thrown around here. The first is Internet 2 and the other is Web 2.0. Both are different. Internet 2 is a consortium of sorts, bringing in some rather cutting edge web technologies. One aspect of I2 is very fast network speeds. I2 is mostly used in educational (i.e. university) organizations.

Web 2.0 is a trend really, visible in sites like delicious.com and flickr, as well as MySpace and YouTube. It's not a precisely defined buzzword, so I'll point you to a starting location for reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2

Answer 3

That's an interesting question.

www2. is recognized the same as www., I can't find any difference. Universities seem to use www2. URLs more, but I don't think this means anything, for instance, try visiting http://www2.yahoo.com , it will just redirect you to www.yahoo.com. So I don't think there's any difference and can't research that prefix specifically, it keeps bringing me to articles about the www. prefix. I guess they're interchangable.

I don't think it's what your sons are telling you about when they say Internet 2, I think this is what they mean:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[1], refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword among technical and marketing communities.



**edit**
The above post mentions https alongside www2. There is a huge difference, https is considered as more "secure" of a protocol. Notice that you'll only encounter https whilst entering sensitive data. It's considered a seperate protocol from http altogether, even though they can function to achieve the same result.

Answer 4

When you buy a domain (like yahoo) you buy "yahoo.co.uk" or "yahoo.com" etc, to keep things simple, let's just take the yahoo.co.uk as an example.

A server can deliver webpages on:
yahoo.co.uk
or
www.yahoo.co.uk

the "www" part is what is known as a subdomain, and if you own the main domain, in theory you can set up any number of subdomains, for example:

answers.yahoo.co.uk
or
uk.yahoo.co.uk
ie.yahoo.co.uk

Large busy websites, which use more resources than one server can handle, has to have some mechanism to redirect the user to the server which is most able to deal with their request. Hence you will find large university websites using www2. - it doens't mean that there are new versions of the web being invented, it's just a subdomain.

I hope that helps :-)

Answer 5

When the internet started out it was given pre-determined support for a certain amount of domain traffic..www., since its explosion more domains are needed hence the need for www2..

Answer 6

As far as I can remember they use 2 servers and the site you've been directed to is on server 2, there's nothing sinister about it.
Its like when you get a secure server and its 'https', its just part of the address.

Answer 7

1

Answer 8

This is just because that they have ran out of domain names on www so the other one started for that purpuse is www2.