Stupid Question

[blindlizard]

I have a stupid question, and I am not even sure how to ask it.
But, here goes.

What does the word in a url that replaces the www represent, and what does it do? A good example is the word forums in vb-world's form url. I have always wondered what it was.

BL

[CMangano]

I can only assume you mean what is the difference between the urls support.microsoft.com and www.microsoft.com?

The first is what is called a host header. Let's say you have the IP address 123.123.123.123 and you have pointed the domain name www.myserver.com at this IP. Now, let's say you want to have another url that points to this IP, and allows the user to enter a different portion off your site, perhaps your support section. In your web server, you can give this IP a host header of support.myserver.com, and then give it the home directory (the directory a user will enter upon coming to this site) of your support folder. Set up DNS so that it goes to 123.123.123.123 whenever someone types in support.mysever.com, and the web server will point the user to the right place (the support folder). I hope that wasn't too confusing.

[JoshT]

Www is the name of the computer. A lot of people called their web servers "www". There's no reason it couldn't be called anything else.

[monte96]

If you have more than one web site configured on the same server, they don't have to both use the same host header, so it is not the machine name.

[JoshT]

Yeah, but it was originally derived from the computer name. Old Unix DNS stuff or something.