When you look at your address bar you can see several important things. You can see the domain and web address that you are at and you can see if the website is secure so you know that any information that you enter will be encrypted. On occasion you may see something that says www2. Most people rarely look at that as the days of including the www when giving out a web address have long since passed, but what is www2?
WWW2?
WWW2? Is that some new level of the Internet or a portal to the deep web? Are we running out of domain names so now we have to go to another level? Is it some super-secret way for the government to spy on us all? Is it an exclusive part of the Internet that we mere mortals have been granted access to but is reserved for the rich and uber geeks? No, not quite.
Not an extra level of the Internet, sorry
It is actually more than just www2 as the number can go upwards to infinity. It is used used with mirror sites that are used to help web servers load balance. Each web server cannot have the same domain name (ie nicelydonesites.com) because traffic would only access one of them hence why subdomains are important. For sites that have a lot of web traffic they need multiple servers to handle the volume and even it out lest the amount of traffic overwhelms it and it crashes. We’ve all been there when a web site or service is running slower than molasses in winter so you know how that feels. Each new web server goes up in numeration, www2, www3 and so on to try to keep a fast user experience.
As a web user you never need to really worry about this. When you visit a site it or download something from that site the web servers and protocols (the magic that runs the Internet) take care of all of this for you and in most cases you are none the wiser. But the next time that you download something from a webpage take a look at the website that it is coming from. It could just be a www2 site and now you can sound really smart around your kids or colleagues!