What does the www8 or www6 in a URL mean?

Question

I see some sites with urls such as www8.example.com or www6.example.com, but I don't know what www8 or www6 mean.

Does anyone know what this means and if it's different from a URL that just has www?

Answer 1

The www part of a url is just a subdomain of the domain name. www is common but there's nothing special about it other than everyone knows about it. The people who run example.com could just have easily used wwwsix or wwweight or secure.example.com or mail.example.com or app.example.com, etc. They could use different sub-domains for different countries, like us.example.com, or fr.example.com.

Answer 2

"www" is just the name of the host or server for the website. You can have any name you like for your webserver, such as "mywebhost.example.com" but "www" is now such a well-known and understood convention for a publicly available worldwide web site that it would be very unusual to do so other than for very well known sites or internal-use hosts (such as an Outlook Web Access site - you might choose to use owa.example.com for your users to visit, separate from your company website).

So, since this is just a host name essentially it can be anything. Sites with multiple front end servers would usually hide these behind a single round-robin name such as www, but it is possible that you will be redirected to a specific host for things like downloads or media streaming. In this case www6 or www8 are probably just two servers in a large farm of hosts providing material to users on the worldwide web.

Answer 3

There's not only www8 or www6. There www1, www2, www3, and so on. These hosts are just different servers for the vast, world wide web.

Answer 4

This is just a subdomain configuration to specific host with this names. The NetAdmin need to name your hosts at one option an in this case wwwN.somedomain.com.

I use may own nomenclature base on host function: ns1, ns2, ...(for name servers), ad1, ad2, ...(for active directory hosts), mail1, mail2, ...(form mail servers), srv1, srv2, srv3, ...(for multipurpose hosts).

But you can use names with mor imagination if you want, like, vader.somedomain.com, homer.domain.com, ilovemydog.manydomains.com.

Answer 5

It just means someone has no imagination and someone never come up to read the proper guide on domain usage: http://no-www.org/

In fact, it's more of first issue. Instead of calling it srvr8.example.org or serv8.example.org, etc, they use what's first on their minds: www. It is deprecated. Domains working only on www always make me a bit mad.

In some cases it even comes to me sending a mail to site admin to review no-www.org. :)