Do you use your Domain or a Subdomain to run your web app?

Definitely worth separating to a subdomain.
I've worked in 2 different companies that started with same domain and then had a huge project to split. Some reasons:

1. SEO - the web app usually doesn't require the same meta tags, sitemap, etc
2. Technically easier to separate servers, cookies, etc
3. Sites that redirect to the webapp when you're logged in, force the user to log out if they want to see anything on the site itself
4. Analytics - you'd usually want to measure differently

There are a lot of discussion on this on internet. Here are two pointers to make it simple.

• Use app.example.com if it's an actual login app, dashboard or something. (Have done that for Siteoly)
• Use example.com/insights if its just content. (Have done that for Micro SaaS HQ Insights )

It helps technically as well, since you can have different cookies and virtual hosts per subdomain

This depends pretty heavily on what your app does. If your site is tiered (free/paid/premium/corporate,) and you start your business model with that vision in mind, bouncing to a subdomain is the way to go.

A place like Figma puts their value in ease of use -- their niche early on was to be as automagical and easy to use as compared to their more traditional competitors, so bump around to a main domain with links that are easy to share.

So -- YOUR mileage may vary!

Hello, I'm new to this huge community. I was looking for tips to create an app for my skateboarding company as I am providing online skating services to all the youngsters and kids over there for better guidance in the skateboarding industry.

I tried android studio for creating an app for
https://skatingplay.com/
But went in vain all my hard work. Do you have any recommendations for a better future?

Separation of concerns: Using a subdomain allows companies to separate their marketing website from their application. This can be helpful for organizational purposes, and it may also make it easier to scale the application separately from the marketing website.

• app.example.com. Use as console page
• example.com. Use as landing page

I typically use the main domain for the sales/info page and subdomains for everything else. That way, I can host the “everything else” in a different way. For example, I can just use GitHub to host the static marketing site (I’m a developer) but point a subdomain to a VPS or cloud service for the app. I can also run multiple apps in multiple places, experiment, etc.

I also create a lot of test projects and I don’t always buy the domain name first. I’m that case I setup subdomains on my main domain such as:

• foo.example.com
• bar.example.com

The tech stack (CMS) is different for our marketing site (www version), so it's much easier to have our actual product on a subdomain.

While it may not really matter right now, if you ever need to split out your main app from your landing pages later down the track (say you hire a marketing team who needs to make changes to your website independently to your dev team) it can be a real headache to do. Especially if your customers are using direct links to your app or have set up any integrations. This was a huge problem at my last startup and we had to do a massive migration, set up redirects etc. Any project I now make sure that the app is on a separate subdomain to the landing pages. It may not matter initially, but when it does start to matter it'll save you a massive headache.

One of the reasons many big companies do this is that they main site and the app are actually controlled by two different departments / org units. Marketing will often control the main site and the IT department won't have access to it other than setting up the DNS. While the IT department controls the sub domain app.

If you're marketing site is built into your monolith, I would just use the same one. If you've got a static site generator for your marketing site and an app I would use a sub domain.

It always depends on the project, but I prefer a subdomain for the app. That way I can handle the marketing in many ways, and most of the time using a no code tool to launch fast and don't bother building just basic HTML stuff.

it helps by keeping things separate, you can have different servers/services for the core application and for the marketing website that may endup using a cms such as wordpress for
example.

Sometimes it's nice to have a marketing site on your main domain using a CMS that is easy to manage than having your app on a subdomain. This can lead to complications in the future where you don't know if a user is logged in and have to share complex logic with the CMS.

As a developer, I went with one site to handle everything because it's easy for me to manage. T.LY app and marketing pages share the same CSS, giving the site the same look and feel. I still use a CMS to manage the blog but write custom templates to render the content using the CMS API. This solution has worked great for me!