Ask HN: A.foo.com vs. Foo.com/A

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422845

by paddw • 3 years ago

8 11 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I feel like the former one has become much more popular recently. Why? AFAIK there is little practical difference, other than CORS being more of a problem with the former as well. Is it just aesthetics?

mattl3• 3 years ago

GitLab does it so that if you're not logged in, you get bounced from gitlab.com to about.gitlab.com but when you're signed in, you can access the app from gitlab.com without the need for any subdomain name for say app.gitlab.com or the like

nik7362• 3 years ago

This is super confusing.

mattl3• 3 years ago

I think it’s pretty great. You go there and get bounced over to a marketing website. Once you’re logged in, you skip the marketing page entirely.

Eiim• 3 years ago

What does that achieve compared to bouncing users to gitlab.com/about?

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

A.foo.com can be served by a different IP address than B.foo.com whereas foo.com/A has to be on the same address as foo.com/B.

If you have different DNS names those functions can be on different servers using different technology. One could be in AWS, one in Azure, another on a mac in your office, another on a CDN, another could be some SAAS vendor operating under your brand.

codegeek• 3 years ago

"whereas foo.com/A has to be on the same address as foo.com/B."

Does it though ? I could always reverse proxy /B to another host, correct ?

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

It is still going through one server if you reverse proxy. If everything is inside one data center it can perform pretty well but you will lose the performance benefits a CDN or something like that could bring to a subdomain.

nektro• 3 years ago

per-origin security

gndk• 3 years ago

SEO. A subdomain is generally considered as a separate site. So having all content on the root domain increases its authority and thus rankings.

The Cloudflare blog has a good explanation: https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-bes...

Ask HN: A.foo.com vs. Foo.com/A

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