www v/s www1 v/s www2. Role of CNAME and DNS.

How are www, www1, www2, etc. different? Role of CNAME & DNS?

Let's start with discussing what the different parts of a typical web site address mean? Say for example, if we take http://www.google.com then the first part from left http denotes the protocol being used for communication on Internet. The two most popular protocols being used are http and ftp. Requests using different protocols connect to server at a separate (default unless otherwise explicitly specified) port on the targeted server. Like an http request connects to the server via TCP and connects by default at port number 80. An 'http' request is also called a Web request.

Now that we have kind of understood what the first part of a typical URL means, let's move on to the next parts. We're discussing only the web site addresses in this article so the first part will always be either 'http' or 'https' which is nothing but HTTP running on SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Following this there will be a set of 3 characters (://), usually termed as delimiters and they separate the protocol from the web site address.

The web site address in our example is www.google.com like every other web site address this is also of the form CNAME.secondaryName.TopLevelDomain where TopLevelDomain is something like '.com', '.org', ... etc. and they are resolved by the top level domain name servers called the root servers. These root servers are maintained by naming authroities like ICANN. The TopLevelDomain are normally one word long only, but they can be made of two (or maybe more) words separated by '.' as well, for example 'co.in', 'co.uk', ... etc. they are also top level domain names.

Left to the top level domain names comes the secondaryName which is the normally the unique name you choose for your website. Like in our example this name is 'google'. These names are resolved using the lower level domain name servers (DNS). Again it's not necessary that the secondaryName will always be one word long. It can be made up of severalwords maybe to maintain a hierarchy for the purpose of segregating (and then serving) requests of different types based on country, sub-domains, etc.

The leftmost part of a web site address is normally 'www' which is nothing but the name of the web server of the company hosting and running the web site. As it's a name and hence it can anything like 'aaa', 'aa', 'aaaa', 'www1' , 'www2' or any other string unique in context of the company specific DNS as these names are not resolved by the root or intermediate level DNS instead it's the company specific DNS which resolves it. Resolving a name simply means returning the IP address of the computer so that a combination of IP Adrress and a port (normally a default port) can be used by a client to establish a TCP connection.

This leftmost part of the web site which is normally resolved by the company specific DNS is usually called CNAME or Canonical Name. In case of our example, CNAME is 'www'. Like every other part this part is not required to be a one-word long name only. It all depends how much string is mapped to the actual IP address of the server in the company specific DNS mapping table. Needless to re-iterate that this can be any string (unique in the particular DNS context) you want and not only 'www'.

Let's take another example. The address of this blog is http://geekexplains.blogspot.com, so for this address 'com' is the top level domain, 'blogspot' is the secondaryName and 'geekexplains' is the canonical name which identifies this blog uniquely under the context of the secondary domain named 'blogspot'. The same physical server might (or probably for sure) is used for many other blogs running under 'blogspot'. This is probably achieved by having separate active ports (on the physical machine) each of which hosting processes responsible for one blog each. Ever wondered why the address 'http://www.geekexplains.blogspot.com' also takes you to the same blog? Well... because two canonical names 'geekexplains' and 'www.geekexplains' are probably mapped to the same IP Address - Port combination which hosts the process servicing the GeekExplains blog. The DNS at secondary domain requires that all the canonical names are unique in its context which is why you're asked to pick an unique name for your blog while you create one. Another interesting point to note here is that the client browser establishes TCP connection on the default Port Number 80 only as it connects to the server hosting 'blogspot.com' only and the request is further resolved there to return the HTTP response of the actual blog to the client. The mapping table of 'blogspot' DNS makes sure that the requests to any of the blogs running under it are intercepted by it and subsequently all the requests are serviced as expected. Hope this helps. Any doubts? Or, have anything to add/modify here? Feel free to reach me by dropping a comment.

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