Member Avatar for cakka

What the diferrent of www1 and www?
Thanks.

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Short answer: neither label is special — both are ordinary DNS hostnames. Building on and , the real differences come from how DNS and the web server are configured, and from operational choices you make (routing, TLS, cookies, SEO), not from the names themselves.

Key technical points missing above:

  • HTTP servers use the Host header to decide which site to serve, so one IP can host example.com, www.example.com and many others. DNS maps names to IPs (A/AAAA) or to other names (CNAME); how you point www or www1 determines where traffic lands.
  • You cannot place a CNAME at the zone apex (root) of a domain; providers offer ALIAS/ANAME or “CNAME flattening” for that use case. See Cloudflare and Route 53 docs for provider-specific options: Cloudflare: CNAME at root? and Route 53 Alias records.
  • Operationally, pick a canonical hostname (www or bare domain), issue a 301 redirect from the other, include all names in your TLS certificate (or use a wildcard), and set cookie domains intentionally so they don’t leak across subdomains. For SEO guidance see Google’s recommendations on consolidating duplicate URLs: Google Search Central.

Quick checklist for admins: verify DNS records, confirm Host-header handling on your web server (see MDN Host header), test TLS SANs with an SSL checker, and ensure redirects are 301. These steps close the practical gaps not covered in earlier replies by , and .

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for peter_budo

www1 would be somebodies way how to separate different servers with different sub domains

Member Avatar for bappaditya

They have multiple web servers so they called them www1, www2, etc because you can't set up multiple web servers on the same domain name and name them all www because then there would be no way to tell which server to access.

Member Avatar for humbug


Are you saying "www1" is to as "mail" is to mail.google.com? Does this mean that "www" a subdomain but many modern web servers are able to assume a subdomain of "www" when none is given? (because "" doesn't give a response)

Thanks for clarification.

Member Avatar for digital-ether

What the diferrent of www1 and www?
Thanks.

There is nothing significant about "www1".

It is just what some large sites have chose as their subdomain following the format of the - historically - default subdomain "www".

Member Avatar for samarudge

With subdomains you could pritty much have anything you want. www. is not required for nearly all web browsers and you can do quide a few subdomains (If your hosting provider allows it)
E.G.
google.com
gives the same result as
www.google.com
but there may be a backup server running on

incase the main server goes down
its sort of like server 1, server 2 etc.
You could have a subdomain like

and send it to a different server to
yourdomain.com

Hope at least some of that made sense :$

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