Thanks for all your answers. To clarify my question, I'm looking for advice regarding how best to set up users for a web app, e.g., username.myapp.comvs myapp.com/username and the pros and cons of each. All users will be using essentially the same app that will have their data in their account. I can see the logic of setting up subdomain for things like a universal login and, say, metrics for example. Is javascripting more difficult across subdomains? Is one approach beter in terms of security? Essentially the entire app will be running on https. Thanks again! Tim On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Nathan Nobbe <quickshiftin@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Tim Martens <tim.martens@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > >> Language/Framework decisions aside... my main question is about subdomain >> ( >> customerx.appname.com vs subdirectory (appname.com/customerx/) models for >> instances of individual customers' accounts. >> >> It seems most people are opting for the former -- is this but a trebd? -- >> but I see flickr use the latter. The guys at Particletree (i.e., Wufoo) >> wrote a blog post about it ( >> http://particletree.com/notebook/subdomains-development-sucks/) years ago >> to >> which they still attest. >> > > subdomains are useful for separating out various applications on a site. > for example, suppose you have a client facing application w/ a backend, > then a separate application for coordinating development of this app, trac > for example. say your main url is blah.com. > > for the main app you might just take your blah.com proper (this is > typical), then for the trac site you have trac.blah.com. within each of > these applications the subdirectory approach is taken. > > basically if you were to use a subdomain approach for a single app it would > typically need to be massive to rationalize (unless youre insane). lots of > large sites use subdomains to implement distribution. say you have a big > image hosting site, all the images are stored on s3, so you might have > images.blah.com in that case (note the images are hosted on separate > infrastructure). > > just general guidelines, quite vague, but hopefully helpful. > > -nathan >
