What is www2? What does that mean

[Sujit15]

Last Thursday I went to HP website to download drivers for my HP LaserJet P3005 printer. As soon as I selected the model under support section the website redirected me to h20180.www2.hp.com. Before it was on www.hp.com. But why am I redirected? What is www2? Is this a forge site or not? What does www2 means?

What is the difference between www & www2? I've seen sites that say www2, what does that mean?

[Grohu]

A website URL (for example www.techarena.in) is just identified by techarena.in which actually depicts the server of the organization. WWW is only a convention that is used to distinguish a company web server from its various servers. Many websites such as HP and others use www2, www3 as names for additional web servers in order to handle their traffic. So, in short, apart from the last 2 words like techarena.in whatever comes before depends and is determined by the website owner.

[arturro]

www2 is just the subdomain managed by the website owner. Many website owner creates image servers in order to handle their traffic. So don't worry, h20180.www2.hp.com is also the official site handled by HP only. It cannot be a forge site. Don't be afraid to download the drivers.

[GhostRider]

www2, www3, etc are just the different servers handled by HP to handle load balancing or something. You can set it up for a site so that one client is assigned to one container on a server and another on another container of a server, this is set so that if one server gets down another will remain active to handle the clients request. Its just a subdomain and so don't worry.