There were several unsupported theories that tried to explain these, such as: “it’s a new Internet that is faster”, “the higher the number in the wwx, the higher the bandwidth allowed”, and so and so, until I found out the real cause: subdomains. Yes, you heard right, it’s not a faster internet protocol, not a higher bandwidth server, they’re just subdomains. But why would they create subdomains with such names? The most correct theory I can think of, is to route servers. I mean if you have one server and it is getting too much traffic, you would get a new server, and for ease of use, you would simply name is ww2. Also, this could apply in cases where you get so much traffic all around the world and you want to enhance users’ experience in your site, so you would buy different servers all around the globe and name them ww2, ww3, etc.
Another common case is organizational reasons. In an extremely large company, www might be for their main marketing website. And, ww2 might be, say, for product documentation pages.
In an ideal world, all departments would share perfectly. In practise, a big company might have their (www) marketing pages managed by an external agency. Their internal (ww2) pages done by their internal team. Often, the marketing agency just doesn't update pages quickly or refuses to run certain stacks, may be too limiting in terms of bureaucratic needs.
The marketing agency may insist on controlling the www and not sharing due to past situations where a company website went down due to internal reasons and yet the agency got blamed, or vice versa.
So, theoretically, there's no need to do this with modern load balancing and such. But, in practise, it can be a lot cheaper, straightforward and allow better business productivity.
Oftentimes, ww{x} is used to indicate a particular server of a set of mirrored servers. If properly configured, I could have www.mydomain.com point to my web site on a load balancer, while I could use ww1, ww2, ww3, etc to access the site guaranteed from a specific LBed server.People running large(-ish) sites used to do this when they needed to break up the load between more than one server. One machine would be called www then the next one would be called www2, etc.
Today, much better load balancing solutions are available that don't require you to expose your internal machine naming conventions to the browser clients.
For me, it was great to know this information. I know there are lots of web users that have, at least once, wondered why a domain name sometimes has that. I hope this was helpful. Any question, comment, or suggestion, please let me know and I’d be more than glad to assist you.
