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
Facebook same domain
Feedly same domain
Figma same domain
GitHub same domain
Gitlab different domain
Google Cloud different domain
Heroku different domain
Hey different domain
Instagram same domain
Linear same domain
Mux different domain
Netflix same domain
Netlify different domain
Notion same domain
Paper different domain
Planetscale different domain
Reddit 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
Twitter 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.