website.com/forums or forums.website.com

[WastedSavior]

This is a question I have been wondering for a long time now and honestly I am not well versed on the differences here.

Between 'website.com/forums' and 'forums.website.com' which one is better to use?​

Are there different reasons for using one over the other in different situations? Is it just aesthetics and you should just pick one based on how pretty you think the shiny URL is? Begin Discussion! Or just vote if you're lazy.

 

[Accname]

I am not a 100% sure but for all I know there is no technical difference. Its just personal preference.

For that matter, I prefer the second option, having the websites name at first place.

 

[Darthfett]

mail.google.com
forum.thehelper.net

I prefer this style.

 

[Artificial]

there is no technical difference

There are actually some technical differences between the two. A subdomain is not considered the same source as the upper domain by web browsers, which would lead to a couple of things:

• HTML5 localStorage cannot be shared as easily between the forum and the rest of the site.
• Cookies set on the different domains may or may not be shared with each other.
• Using certain security headers such as Content-Security-Policy will have to take the subdomain into account.

(And maybe some others I can't think of.) Then again, all of these can be security features if you don't need the subdomain and the main domain to share much data.

Apart from the differences on the browser side, there are two more I can come up with: search engines use separate rankings for the subdomains, and the subdomain solution may be easier to implement if the forum software is separated from the rest of the site.

 

[The Helper]

Google used to rank differently sometimes on the different urls. Usually, those forums.website.com are just redirects to whatever/forums and also because you can search engine optimize the first part of the name of the forum url.

 

[monoVertex]

It also depends on where exactly are you pointing those URLs to. For example, my blog is hosted on Tumblr, but I have a hosting provider as well, on which I host my portfolio and various other projects.

However, I cannot assign monovertex.com/blog to the Tumblr blog, so I'm left only with blog.monovertex.com (which in my opinion looks better and more professional anyway).

Artificial pretty much covered it, I have encountered these security issues before and they can really be a hassle, if you find yourself in those situations.