In agreement with bm. The domain (eg google.com) handles many services and the www kind of says which service it is using (www, mail, smpt, pop, ftp...). Of course, as www traffic is probably the most common kind, servers will most likely know what is expected, and act accordingly.

Understanding the Context

Many servers are configured to redirect traffic from (eg) google.com to www.google.com. One reason for this is ... Edit: to answer your original question, yes, any member of www-data can now read and execute /var/www (because the last bit of your permissions is 5 = read + exec). But because you haven't used the -R switch, that applies only to /var/www, and not to the files and sub-directories it contains.

Key Insights

Now, whether they can write is another matter, and depends on the group of /var/www, which you haven't ... Hostname is an attribute of a system stored locally on that system. "Computer name" is what Windows uses to refer to the hostname. A subdomain is a DNS concept. In DNS, domain names (domains for short) can be authoritative or non-authoritative - if they are non-authoritative, that means another server "handles" that domain.

Final Thoughts

So in a domain such as www.mysite.invalid - one thing that could ... I see some sites with urls such as www8.example.com or www6.example.com, but I don't know what www8 or www6 mean. Does anyone know what this means and if it's different from a URL that just has www? What does the www8 or www6 in a URL mean? - Super User