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brothertruffle880Flag for United States of America

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URL question: WWW versus WWW1 in address line

How does www1 differ from www in the address line?
Some sites come up with www1, others with www.
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John
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Avatar of Brian Benson
Brian Benson

There is no functional difference.  

They all use HTTP protocol to send and receive data.

It is just a different subdomain on the main domain.  It can be anything they wish.   Many people will do this during site migrations for testing and such and some never update their www. domains back.

Here is the HTTP Specifications that are used for data transmissions for even further reading.

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html
Avatar of Shaun Vermaak
Some browser automatically adds www and you can use CTRL+ENTER to automatically add www. prefix and .com suffix. www1 as the main URL just alienates users in my opinion. It is much easier to just rewrite or redirect URLs
Some websites don't use www (Example: https://slashdot.org).  From a technical point of view you can put nothing or anything you want before the domain name.

domain.com
www.domain.com
www1.domain.com
w4w.domain.com
hello.domain.com
whatever.domain.com

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Most of the websites I've visited are configured to use www but it's not mandatory, more of an internet convention.