Hosting Apps on a Subdomain?
A few years back I thought it was slick that Trello hosted their app on the same domain as their landing page, so we copied that for Recipe Yak.
On the other hand, Kodiak has its app on a separate domain hosted on Digital Ocean, while the landing page / doc site is hosted on Netlify.
The choice of subdomain or no subdomain came up again on the Placemark blog, which also linked to a related tweet. Both the tweet and post recommended hosting your app on a separate domain, which definitely simplifies things.
But what do most people do? Do they host their app on a separate domain?
Here are the results from my incomplete survey:
site | domain type |
---|---|
1Password | different domain |
Ably | same domain |
Algolia | same domain |
Airbnb | same domain |
AWS | different domain |
Basecamp | different domain |
CircleCI | different domain |
Cloudflare | different domain |
Crunchy Data | same domain |
Datadog | different domain |
Digital Ocean | different domain |
Discord | same domain |
Dribbble | same domain |
Dropbox | same domain |
Elastic | different domain |
same domain | |
Feedly | same domain |
Figma | same domain |
GitHub | same domain |
Gitlab | different domain |
Google Cloud | different domain |
Heroku | different domain |
Hey | different domain |
same domain | |
Linear | same domain |
Mux | different domain |
Netflix | same domain |
Netlify | different domain |
Notion | same domain |
Paper | different domain |
Planetscale | different domain |
same domain | |
Segment | different domain |
Sentry | same domain |
Slack | different domain |
Soundcloud | same domain |
Spotify | different domain |
Stripe | different domain |
TikTok | same domain |
Trello | same domain |
Twitch | same domain |
same domain | |
Vercel | same domain |
Vimeo | same domain |
Youtube | same domain |
Conclusion
The only pattern I see is that social media sites use the same domain, otherwise it’s variable.