Name given to a secondary (personal pages) server

Hi,

The University of Bath used to run one primary web service under the
address "www.bath.ac.uk".  This machine served central web pages (stored
on that machines disks) as well as personal home pages (stored on the
central campus filestore.

It was decided that the job of that machine would be best done by two
servers:  One for central pages, one for personal ones, each running on a
machine local to where the data is being stored.  All well and good.

What is the best current pratice in naming these machines?

We have two options, and we are being asked to vote:  Either:

 a) www.bath.ac.uk 	for central pages
    www2.bath.ac.uk	for personal home pages

 b) www.bath.ac.uk	for central pages
    homes.bath.ac.uk	for personal home pages.

My opinion was to go for (b).  I based my decision mostly on examples seen
from two sites:  Netscape and w3.org.

At Netscape they have many host names, each of which reflects what that
server does;  "home.netscape.com" "cgi.netscape.com"
"developer.netscape.com" and so on.  It is important to note that these
need not be distinct machines, but any number of these could be running on
the same machine.

At W3C it seems that they have "www.w3.org" which points to any of
"www1.w3.org" through to "www10.w3.org" and possibly higher.  While I
don't know for sure, I think that this is msotly for load sharing - each
of these machine will serve the same pages as the others and thus will
only have to deal with 1/10th of the load.  People never see these other
addresses.

Does this reflect current practice (if there is any) by other sites around
the Web?

Glen

==============================================================
Glen Monks, UKOLN, 01225-826450, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~ma4gm

Received on Monday, 20 January 1997 12:09:59 UTC