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Discussion on: Do you prefer subdomains or subdirectories?

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Mark Smith • Edited

I feel that users do not like subdomains.

My impression is that people prefer to read example.com or example.com/blog rather than blog.example.com. I could be wrong about this. Maybe subdomains are fashionable again.

Were they ever fashionable? I dunno. Worth mentioning because trends do make a difference.

From the perspective of running a website though, there are considerable advantages to using subdomains. For starters you don’t have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. One part of your infrastructure can go down, but the rest is still up.

The downside though is that it’s more difficult to manage many different servers rather than one big website with lots of folders.

As your infra grows I feel it’s likely there will be a time when you just have to add something to a subdomain because a particular tech won’t fit into your one big website. The only way at that stage around subdomains is to just have more entirely different domains (i.e. facebook.com and instagram.com).

The hard part there is to find lots of cool sounding domains at a good price.