Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?
The company owns the “example.com” domain name and can put what they want before it. The “www.” part (which stands for World Wide Web) was a convention for the company to put their website on, as other subdomains may be used for other services than websites. As time went on, companies started to make the “example.com” itself point to the website as it is shorter and easier to type/remember, and made the “www.example.com” redirect you to “example.com” for retrocompatibility