Subdomains + Development = Sucks: A quick tip from Kevin Hale of Wufoo

http://particletree.com/notebook/subdomains-development-sucks/

by danw • 19 years ago

36 22 19 years ago

tuukkah2• 19 years ago

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?

aaroniba2• 19 years ago

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.

rjb• 19 years ago

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!

timg6• 19 years ago

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.

lupin_sansei4• 19 years ago

https and SSL are free. It's just that if the certificate is not from a recognised authority it warns you. That's a good thing in my book.

timg6• 19 years ago

That's terrible in my book. What if you are running an entertainment site with lots of subdomains and for every single subdomain the user gets harassed with this question?

These certificates have nothing at all to do with "authority." Just think about it, what exactly do they prove?

Why should you only be allowed to speak in confidence with well identified parties (not that verisign remotely attempts to identify anyone)? Think carefully.

bls• 19 years ago

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.

timg6• 19 years ago

Hey thanks! Do they cover all subdomains also though?

waleedka• 19 years ago

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.

kal-el• 19 years ago

thanks for the note kevin!

aaroniba2• 19 years ago

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

tuukkah2• 19 years ago

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)

sbraford• 19 years ago

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.

Subdomains + Development = Sucks: A quick tip from Kevin Hale of Wufoo

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