
Subdomains + Development = Sucks: A quick tip from Kevin Hale of Wufoo - danw
http://particletree.com/notebook/subdomains-development-sucks/
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aaroniba
For me, even if aiba.wufoo.com and wufoo.com/aiba point to the same IP address
and have the same functionality, the former feels more like _my_ site, whereas
the latter feels more like my part of someone else's site. If you want to
create a service that gives people their own presence on the web, this could
make a difference.

Alternatively, maybe most users don't pay attention to URLs or look at the
distinction above in the same way we developers do.

Also, the subdomain strategy seems to have worked well for Blogger. They serve
users' pages from *.blogspot.com, and their own pages from *.blogger.com.

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rjb
I agree... I think this idea of ownership is growing as "everyday" web users
feel a need to own their online identities and data. We already are seeing
this with tools like Weebly. Web developers and techies have enjoyed this
luxury for quite some time.

One thing I really like about subdomains is that it makes accessing a site
very quick... from my address bar I type "new" and news.yc.com pops right up!

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tuukkah
Not so much suck as have two sides of a coin. Ok, so the article says you may
need to buy an SSL certificate for the domain and setup
user1.localhost.localdomain in dev machines.

On the positive side, your users will be cleanly sandboxed in separate
domains, they get slash-free URIs, and you can have simple IP-based load
balancing.

Any good stories about subdomains? Infogami?

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waleedka
One benefit of subdomains is that you can set cookies for each subdomain
separately. For example, I can be logged in to my user1.example.com and
user2.example.com both at the same time without having to logout and then
login again.

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sbraford
I haven't implemented mass user-generated subdomains in PHP or Python, but it
certainly was a snap to do in Rails.

User-created subdomains didn't seem like they really caught on until 37
Signals started having huge success.

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aaroniba
Question: does the choice to use subdomains or subdirectories affect the stats
that appear on traffic measuring sites like Alexa?

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tuukkah
It affects some of the measuring sites, and web crawler speeds etc. Now Alexa
implicitly says it doesn't affect their stats, but it would be nice to know
something about their algorithm for distinguishing "recognized personal
pages": <http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=12> (edit: corrected the link
to point to traffic rankings faq)

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kal-el
thanks for the note kevin!

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timg
What I hate is that firefox/IE complain if you don't get one of these paid SSL
certificates. The encryption of HTTP traffic should be free and without
unneeded burden.

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bls
Comodo and other SSL providers will give you free certs that don't cause any
warnings. But, they only last 3 months instead of 1 year.

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timg
Hey thanks! Do they cover all subdomains also though?

