Techical question(s): How do I setup/connect these things?
Hey indie hackers. First of all: It's gonna be a long post, just to warn you.
I have a SaaS idea which me and my co-founder are trying to implement, but we lack the "high level overview" about the architecture.
About the SaaS:
It's basically an appointment booking tool. As a client you get on the landing page (which is written in react and has a firebase backend). You choose an open slot and send a request to the salon owner. He approves/rejects/makes a new suggestion for the request.
This is easy, but now we get to the second step:
How would you handle the admin dashboard?
- Would you create something like admin.saasname.com and deploy a seperate application to the subdomain?
- Or would you basically create a routing inside the existing application and then it's something like: saasname.com/admin
What is the better choice?
Now some SEO questions.
Same like above:
- Should we create a subdomain like blog.saas.com?
- Or should we create a path like this: saas.com/blog?
If it's the second case, how can we integrate a blog into our react application, without coding it?
And if it's the first case, the best way is to install wordpress on the subdomain, I guess?
Thanks for your time and help.
Don't host the admin panel on the public internet, that's just asking for trouble.
Host it on an internal firewalled network. If that's too hard, then definitely don't call it "admin", as malicious bots are setup to hit things like that automatically. Make it some obscure path like saas.com/our-obscure-admin-path. But yeah, try not to do that, host it on an internal network instead.
SEO wise, I'm pretty sure saas.com/blog is better. blog.saas.com is considered a different domain by the search engines.
For the react issue, you can configure your web server to farm requests for /blog to a different place on your server. That would be for when navigating directly to /blog. For people who are already on the react site, you can add target=_blank to any links to the blog, which would open them in a new tab, which would get around the single page app bit. Off the top of my head target=_top may work as well.
I could be totally wrong on this but here's my opinion:
With the ease of access we have to cloud deployment now, subdomains are an awesome tool for this case.
However, I think it depends on how different the applications you are trying to link are.
For instance, if the admin portal really is just another page of your main web application than the /admin route is perfectly fine.
If on the other hand it's a completely different application, then to me the admin.domain.com route makes sense.
I went the subdomain route myself for my applications blog:
https://thoughtreps.com - react web application on a digital ocean droplet
https://blog.thoughtreps.com - ghost blog deployed to a separate digital ocean droplet
There isn't really a wrong answer so at the end of the day, it's up to you.
Feel free to reach out if you have any more questions! Happy to try and help.