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?
Though, until load balancers/reverse proxies came onto the scene, separating web traffic to a separate host may have been wise. But then again, that was also when it was more textual and dialup was common.