I've been lurking in some forums at webmasterworld.com, and it finally kicked in why all my accounts have a subdir or subdir link called /www

In case anyone else doesn't know(maybe I'm not dense):

When you get your host set up, you get yourdomain.com. Somewhere inside your dir structure you have a /public_html, or /htdocs. These are the dirs you normally keep your readily accessible websites on. Then you have a /www. It didn't really make sense, although I should have figured it out when I set up a test.mydomain.com subdomain a few weeks ago. www. is a virtual subdomain account that links back to /www

Voila! Your website appears when you type www.yourdomain.com

As a side note, do any of you here participate in Search Engine optimization for your sites?

Originally posted by slade
When you get your host set up, you get yourdomain.com. Somewhere inside your dir structure you have a /public_html, or /htdocs. These are the dirs you normally keep your readily accessible websites on. Then you have a /www. It didn't really make sense, although I should have figured it out when I set up a test.mydomain.com subdomain a few weeks ago. www. is a virtual subdomain account that links back to /www

Voila! Your website appears when you type www.yourdomain.com

I could be wrong, but for the most part the 'www' folder is just a symbolic link to your /public_html folder. The reason for the alias is mostly to ease people from machines that use 'www' as the web accessible folder. Solves the, "Where do I put my web pages?" support emails. Either should work.

It is like a subdomain though, but direction of 'www.domain.com' is uaually handled in DNS (pointing to IP address of main site), or in httpd.conf (aliasing the domain or maybe set to the same document root as domain.com).

I've yet to host on a server where my directories were setup like that.

Well about a year ago, maybe it was two even, I saw that and it was only a symbolic link to the /public_html directory because some people used servers that had a /www directory (RaQs maybe?).