How come some companies have URLs like www1.euro.dell.com?

hack_man_

I noticed that some big companies have strange URLs like Dell have things like www1.euro.dell.com or www-ae.something.com (I live in the UAE)

What are they? Are they server numbers or something? Like you go to Google and it redirects you to your country site. Does it work like you click on a link that goes to a www3. URL and it takes you to the third sever with that domain.

How would you get one? Would it only work if you had a dedicated server?

smartbei

I think they are just subdomains that they use... They find your country by IP and then forward you to that subdomain.

Traveller

HM,

You have the general idea. It could be just different subdomains for different tasks, but it may also be separate servers so that no one server gets too bogged down (especially with the "www1," "www2," "www3" type of URL).

Also, most people are only familiar with URLs that start with "www," but it could be anything you want. If you want people to access your website via "qqq.yourdomain.com," you could do that. Of course, unless you want your site to be private, you probably would not want to use something so unconventional (and you would probably want something a little more secure, anyway). Otherwise, once it's inside your "yourdomain.com," you may do anything you want with it.

billybob

Traveller

Bondings

Those are different servers or server groups to distribute the load.

The "www" actually indicates that it is a webpage instead of ftp or something like that. Big websites like dell or credit card processors sometimes use "www1", "www2", ... to distribute the load or just for geographical locations.

You can see it as a subdomain, just like the "www", but in this case it is on a different server (most of the time).

Anyway, that's what I know about it, I hope it's correct. Wink