Welcome to Just Ask Matt! - The IT industry’s answer to the help column, only slightly more medicated. Today, Mike writes:

How does server naming work with regard to URLs? In addition to “www,” you also see “www2,” “support.somecompany.com,” “channels.lockergnome.com,” etc., etc. Just curious, I’ve never seen the process described anywhere before. Thanks!

Well, Mike, URLs like “support.somecompany.com” are using what is called a subdomain. Sometimes a subdomain might even appear as “somecompany.com/support,” instead. It is basically up to the people who own the domain and what type of hosting setup they have. The advantage to having a subdomain is really more perceived than anything.

It’s sort of hard to explain, so bear with me. “www2″ tells the servers involved in the information transferring to your browser that they want to point your ISP (any ISP, for that matter) to another server. Err, basically it is used to keep the Web site’s server workload balanced among a group of servers. Hope that made some sense to ya. :o)

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