www2, www3, etc.

How do you get these?

[dvduval]

If I wanted to get www2. mysite.com, what would be the procedure?
Also, what is the meaning of the these varying prefixes?

[bobmark]

what people are talking about is
go to:

[www3.google.com...]

and search as normal. The results you will get are (hopefully, fingers crossed, knock on wood) the new update results that will over the next few days migrate to www.google.com
(osomeone explained www3 and www2 as a kind of "staging area" for the update.

[dvduval]

Thanks, BobMark

I'm not necessarily referring to Google, but rather, how does www2 or www3 come about. Another example is Overture, which uses www5. From a DNS point of view, what is the story with these prefixes?

[mack]

To enable www2.yoursite.com you will need to be able to alter your DNS. Some hosting companies allow this although a high percentage do not. In theory you can have whatever.yoursite.com

There has been talk on these boards in the past about using keyword.domain.com , I dont think there ever was a decision as to this being good or bad for google rankings. If you go to your webhosts website they may have more information on dns setings and how you can alter them.

!PLEASE BE VERY CAREFULL WHEN ALTERING YOUR DNS!

(edit for typo)

[edited by: mack at 4:33 pm (utc) on Aug. 23, 2002]

[bobriggs]

dvduval, it's known as a vanity domain or subdomain. You should see if it is available at your hosting provider.

Normally they would map this subdomain to another directory in your main website. There are other configurations, but this is the one I'm familiar with. You would not register www2.mysite.com, just have www.mysite.com registered. Everything else is handled at the server level.

[CHC]

The suffix or "host name" is usually "www" but can be anything your server administrator lets you specify. I use many content relevant host names and my personal experience is that Google and many other search engines drink them up. I have seen some excellent results with such keyworded suffixes.

[kneelsit]

Actually rather than going for www3 4 5 or 6. I feel you are much better off asking your host to set up the server so that your site will come up with just "mysite.com" - much easier to say and remember.

Noting how the usage of the "http://" prefix has dropped off for many situations I would not be surprised to see the same thing occur for the "www" prefix eventually.

[digitalbrain]

many use it to prevent the overloading of servers or to prevent third party domain viewing in the browser bar .

for example ad.doubleclick.net may be redirected by www2.yoursite.com

or if you are having different ad server or a different database server you can assign it accordingly.

Just a matter of smartness :)