Www1 Whats Going On?

[Dave Hounddriver]

I'm sure we are all familiar with the standard format www.anysite.com so today I went to the Philippine airlines site and they are now at www1.philippineairlines.com so I'm wondering, what's with adding the 1???

[Steve]

Nothing special. it's just a mirror of the original site. Often a split server in cases of a lot of visitors, etc.

Edited January 6, 2013 by Steve

[i am bob]

It is just a reflection on the sub-domain holding the requested information on a different server. As Steve said, this one is most likely is a mirror of the site or a split server for traffic. In other situations it could also be a domain set up with multiple servers to handle each section - many older government sites were done this way. The main government server would send you off to various other servers holding information for specific departments. And sometimes, when a company is changing their website, they may shoot you off to a temporary server holding a mirror of the old information while they install the new website on the old server. Ok, it's not factually done this way but for demonstration purposes, this is the easiest to understand the method. This (www1, etc) is normally masked once the information leaves the domain so the user doesn't normally see it but sometimes it is left exposed so that outside technical support can identify where issues may be coming from. And there are still thousands of reasons I did not cover for situations like this - you can learn this by buying my book (available on line) for only $48,619.42 plus taxes, handling and shipping. Sorry - Mastercard, Visa or Pesos are not accepted. :no:

Tomorrow's lesson will be converting IP4 to IP6 - you lucky dogs...!

(c'mon... who's gonna be the first to say nyet? :mocking: )

[JJReyes]

One possible reason is Philippine Airlines recently changed ownership. Their Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) or call center is obviously located in the Philippines. The "in" group creates an offshore company possibly in the British Virgin Islands or Netherland Antilles. Philippine Airlines contracts for BPO services with the "in" group offshore company, which then sub-contracts with call centers in the Philippines. It is a way to skirt around the unions and there are tax advantages. The change in the website address may indicate that the host server was moved overseas.