Why do some people use www2 in their URL?

[WebMasterKrames]

I know you can set your server so the usual "www" can be anything you want, but why do lots of people choose to use "www2"?

[stymiee]

It usually means they either have more then one server for content or switched servers at one point and used www2 for the name of the new server.

[brian.mark]

That was the original way of attempting "Load balancing". It didn't work out well, as spiders sent traffic to whatever server they indexed, but some people still carry over the convention.

The other thing this might be is someone using a service like akamai, where they have www2 being a distributed network and www offering the same page hitting their actual web server.

Brian.

[minorgod]

I wonder if it might also have something to do with typo URLs being added to the vhosts on their server. The "W" key is very close to the "2" key, so maybe they are trying to catch some mistyped URLs based on common typos. Just speculating though...the real reason is probably already mentioned above by someone else.

;)

[netman4ttm]

If you are running your own name server this is no big deal. We use multiple servers, some optimized for php some for Java. Depending on what is needed we simply add a CNAME to the DNS records to point to the best server to use. Odds are that www is a CNAME record for most web servers. ww2 is a name that IBM used a lot for its developer sites. My guess is that the name just got on and got used for servers that were hosting less important data