Is a subdomain OK as your product's web site? | Hacker News Reader

Is a subdomain OK as your product's web site?

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

19 pointsmattjung22 comments

I don't know why the web isn't more friendly to sub domains. We keep wasting domain names. Reusing domains and using sub domains is an elegant solution.

I hate going to web sites that dump every product they own on one page, along with support, company information ,etc. It just makes it harder to find info for what I want when I have to look at everything. If they had a subdomain they can dedicate what appears as a whole site to just that product. Then their company info, career portion, etc can be on their main domain, and keep it all separated.

This might help (if you haven't read it already): http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

I use subdirectories.

From an SEO perspective subdirectories are considered better than subdomains because subdirectories help the ranking of the primary domain better than subdomains.

If you want the overall ranking of www.example.com to improve, use www.example.com/producta and www.example.com/product, not producta.example.com and productb.example.com.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-topleve...

Historically, it’s been kind of a wash about when to use subdomains vs. subdirectories. - Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Some yays for subdomains:
- they allow me to share all administrative code behind the scenes (logging framework, key generator, common scripts, etc.);

- they're free for me on my current hosting plan;

With all due respect, I'd say this guy has bigger problems than subdomain vs. own domain. I reads a lot like he's on a $5/month plan, and it's a deal-breaker to spend eg. $20 for a slice or linode where all those considerations goes away.

What's wrong with that? $15 a month might be all it takes to become "ramen profitable".

What's wrong with that is that he's letting very simple technological concerns get in the way of him releasing his product. It's basically an example of very premature optimization.

I wouldn't say he's "optimizing" if he chooses to use a cheap host and subdomain. He's boostrapping an agile product. He can always get a better host and full domain name in subsequent iterations.

Yeah, and that's laudable. It just reads like he assumes a constraint and starts worrying rather than understanding the constraint his decision imposes. Also, I'm sure, if he shops around, he can find a cheap shared host that'll host multiple domains for him. This further implies that he's in constraints-mode rather than solutions-mode.

The optimization comparison is meant in the sense that it's like he's focusing on whether the compiler correctly unrolls this or that loop, rather than focusing on getting his product out of the door where it can start creating some value for customers.

I would think if you can't afford the extra $10 registration for a new domain that you yourself probably aren't very confident in your products recouping their domain cost.

If such is the case, a company has bigger problems than even the great ones outlined previously.

Deleted comment

[Edit: I was responding to a post which suggested that multiple subdirectories would be optimal if they didn't have to share designs. The post has since been deleted by the author.]

I don't know whether that is a technical limitation, a process limitation, or a phantom limitation. If it is a technical limitation, there are ways to fix it.

For example:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/blog/

These are three subdirectories which I have reasons for running off of distinct (but similar) designs. Two of them are different controllers in Rails, the third is actually a Wordpress blog (PHP) which is actually served from a machine which is physically distinct from the one running Rails. This is accomplished by a bit of layout abusing trickery in Rails and an Nginx config file which takes anything starting with /blog and proxies it to Apache rather than using the standard serve-it-if-exists-on-disk-otherwise-proxy-to-mongrel Rails pattern. (Reverse proxies are like caching and duct tape: if they don't solve the problem you just aren't using enough of them.)

Why are these three all on the same domain? SEO. I want links to A/Bingo or the blog to help build trust for my domain. If they were subdomains, while that would simplify my server configuration a bit, Google would consider them mostly separate entities on the trust graph, such that e.g. a link from ajaxian.com to the A/Bingo code would not help convince Google my bingo card pages were trustworthy.

Upvoted for the reverse proxy quote. :-)

It works, but I wouldn't do it. For one it makes selling a product line a tough thing to do.

Subdomains are best for separate "apps" on your server.

www.company.com/product1, product2, etc. store.company.com/product support.company.com/product . . .

Why would that be?

Why not "yourcompany.com/productname/"?

I would do both: product.company.com and (www.)company.com/product/.

That splits your link juice to no positive effect.

Having one redirect to the other is a decent idea. That's what google does. http://analytics.google.com http://google.com/analytics

Just like altavista.digital.com. How did that work out?

Subdomains loose you SEO juicyness. So no, better to use diretories (unless you're say Yahoo I suppose).

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