www3?

[jhewitt]

I'm relatively new to web design, graduated from college with a degree in graphic design, but we didn't do much in the web field, and now i'm really starting to love it and do things on my own. I've recently taken a job where I'm redesigning the website because what they have now, frankly, isn't the best site, so I'm going to make it better looking and whatnot.

What I want to do, is put my site up on the web, but still keep the original site for now. I just want to make mine go live so that people can see what they think of it and make suggestions of where things should go before going fully live for the public. I know that my college did that, and they used a www3...site instead of just the regular www. site- how does that work? what is a www3? is that something that I'd want to use in order to do what I'm trying to do?

Any help would be WONDERFUL - thank you so much!!! you guys/gals are amazing and I look forward to working with you ALL!!

Jeremy

:nana: - man i love that nana! haha

[alvo]

Sites that have a lot of traffic need to cope with it some how. The first line of defense is to spread the load across two servers, making it possible to serve much more traffic than a single server alone. Once that is no longer sufficient, you need a way to direct traffic to application servers that, if possible, will direct the requests to more capable servers and distribute the load as efficiently as possible. The Apache web server has something called RewriteMap that ses a file called servers.map in which you list the available servers (www1, www2, www3 ...) and it sets up a proxy rule to select at random an available server and append the requested URL to it (you ask for a page at http://www.domain.com/somefile... and it gives you http://www3.domain.com/somefile...). If one server has twice the capability of the others you can compensate for this by listing the server in the servers.map file twice, there by directing twice as much traffic to it as the others with half the capability. So the number you saw in the URL was simply one of multiple servers handling requests to that domain.