Subdomain Advantages Or Dissadvantages

[rnmcd]

is one preferred over the other depenidng upon situation?

Edited September 28, 2004 by TCH-Don

[TCH-Bruce]

They are basically one in the same.

 

Subdomains can be accessed h*tp://subdomain.yourdomain.ext

 

Folder are accessed h*tp://yourdomain.ext/foldername

[Madmanmcp]

I guess the only advantage for a sub-domain is fewer keystrokes for the URL.

 

http://subdomain.domain.com = 26

http://www.domain.com/subdomain = 30

[AlanV]

A subdomain's advantage is that you can access it through both URLs (since a subdomain is a third-level-domain linked to a subdirectory).

I always use subdomains when I'm designing a new part of my site But it's really all preference.

[Deverill]

It helps separate different aspects of a site and is easier to remember. For instance, support.microsoft.com is easier to remember than microsoft.com/support and it separats their support section from their products and general information section of the site.

 

Another big difference is best shown as an example:

On one of my clients' site he has a fishing charter business and he also has a GTO he's proud of and wants to show off. For a long tme I had to deal with the car fanatics messing up the statistics of who is looking for fishing boats. I finally set up the GTO pages as a subdomain which has a separate set of statistics in the cPanel.

[rnmcd]

That was very enlightening Jim. Thanks for the post!

 

Sometimes I see URLs without the "www" (that don't have a subdomain), how and why would that be done?

 

For example, http://website.com

[TCH-Rob]

The www is a subdomain. Your website should pull up with or without the www in front. Though you will find that some sites will not work that way it is just a settings issue on the server.

[TCH-Thomas]

The www is a subdomain

You´re saying I can make subdomain like www.jikrantz.se (jikrantz.se/www)

and have the net not think its the root of mysite like the normal www.jikrantz.se?

[TCH-Rob]

Not quite Thomas. Everything to the left of domain.com is a subdomain. You cannot create it because it is already there, the www already exists as a subdomain pointing to domain.com. Could you modify the A record to point elsewhere? I suppose so. My answer was in response to why are some domains listed without a www. I often do not type the www because it is a little faster for me but in general they both resolve to the same place.

[TCH-Thomas]

ok, got it.

 

Just one question...

So, I could never make folder "www" and then make a subdomain of it since www already is a subdomain?

[Deverill]

Right, Thomas. Look at your File manager in cPanel. When you first open it there is already the www "subdomain folder" and that is where we put our website files.

 

At work the WWW is required to get to our sites - if you just put historictours.com it goes to a "Under Construction" page. I don't know why they did that but most places assume that if there is no subdomain to use the www one.

[TCH-Rob]

Correct. WWW is a subdomain by definition and it is already created for you and set to point to the root of your site or domain.com, however you prefer to think about it.

 

I like this article on subdomains as it explains it a bit further.

[Montty]

Wow thank you for this little subdomain introductory course, I must admit that in my mind subdomains have always been synonyms to misteries

 

Not anymore though and thanks to you all as already triggered a few ideas which are going to help me tremendously!! Thumbs Up

[oompahloompah]

I also quite enjoyed the article at websiteGear whose link Rob provided. Thanks.

 

I have a question - is it possible for a subdomain to point elsewhere other than a subdirectory, for example it could point to a subsubdirectory or even a completely different directory altogether?

 

It would be nice if visitors to my site can access the subdomain by only one way, that is thru blahblah.domain.com instead of two ways - blahblah.domain.com and www.domain.com/blahblah

[oompahloompah]

Is it possible for a subdomain to point elsewhere other than a subdirectory, for example it could point to a subsubdirectory or even a completely different directory altogether?

 

It would be nice if visitors to my site can access the subdomain by only one way, that is thru blahblah.domain.com instead of two ways - blahblah.domain.com and www.domain.com/blahblah Is there any way of achieving this?

 

Thanks.

[TCH-Don]

Merging posts and they are the same.

[oompahloompah]

I've reposted my above query as a whole new topic to here to gain better visibility - http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...showtopic=13244

 

Thanks.

[TCH-Don]

Whoops, sorry I merged the wrong way.

[TCH-Don]

I wonder if a redirect would do what you want

so domain/subname would be redirected to sub/domain

I thought I saw that addressed here before, but can't find it.

[paultwang]

An advantage of a subdomain is the ability to use absolute directory structures. For example, if your "Go back to Homepage" hyperlink a-href to "/index.html", it will go to the uppermost index.html of the subdomain instead of the uppermost index.html in your main web site.