Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : Our maindomain or alternative domains, for customers?

[jagarco]

Hi there

I´m gonna start a project soon, ONE of its 15 features is where the users can have their own website with a subdomain.

- Let say we get up to 200000 users
- Let say we manage to use policies and restrictions to minimize the junky accounts(moreover is going to be in Spanish).

I was wondering what would be the optimum way to go...

A) customer.ourdomain.com

B) customer.ourdomain.xx
Where xx are country ltds

C) customer.ourdomain.xx hosted on another server


How heavy would be for our main website to "resolve" each subdomain from a list of 200000 or more in order to show the DB generated website for that subdomain.?

A)
Pros
- Our brand would get maximum exposure and positioning

Cons
- Lots of traffic and junk traffic http requests, extra load for server.

Wondering:
Is it posible to have our main domain hosted on a server but subdomains hosted on a different server?
Even if so, would the initial "resolving" step still be an intense resource load for our main site performance?

[quantumphysics]

Is it posible to have our main domain hosted on a server but subdomains hosted on a different server? yes
Even if so, would the initial "resolving" step still be an intense resource load for our main site performance? no

in any case do not use the same domain. if your site is example.com, use exampleusers.com or something. don't let them be on the same domain ever

[jagarco]

Originally Posted by quantumphysics

in any case do not use the same domain. if your site is example.com, use exampleusers.com or something. don't let them be on the same domain ever

I see, could it be like...

maindomain.com for me

For them, several options to choose:

maindomain.xx different countries ltds
otherdomain.com for the ones who don´t want country related.

I supose that just by NOT being .com is different from our main domain, right?

thank you

[jagarco]

Actually...
MainDomain is going to be a SaaS, so, users are going to be working on the domain.

Imagine zoho.com giving the CRM service where you login and upload info and etc, but also the option to view your data as a website like user.zoho.com

So, why giving them a different domain if 90% of the service is the SaaS itself?, they´re still going to login and use several tools under maindomain.com, even controlling what they want to publish on their website from the SaaS.

Why is wordpress giving main domain "websites"?

[quantumphysics]

Originally Posted by jagarco

Actually...
MainDomain is going to be a SaaS, so, users are going to be working on the domain.

Imagine zoho.com giving the CRM service where you login and upload info and etc, but also the option to view your data as a website like user.zoho.com

So, why giving them a different domain if 90% of the service is the SaaS itself?, they´re still going to login and use several tools under maindomain.com, even controlling what they want to publish on their website from the SaaS.

Why is wordpress giving main domain "websites"?

This is SaaS and they can't write their own server side code or place malicious JS, right?

[jagarco]

Originally Posted by quantumphysics

This is SaaS and they can't write their own server side code or place malicious JS, right?

I'm very concerned on security, I know PHP/MySQL but not an expert, I'll be using Frameworks and work on this project for months.

The "your website" option of our SaaS is going to be "simple", they'll choose the template we'll have, create pages, enter txt/photos and that's it for now.

So, when accessing user1.maindomain.com our SaaS will "create" a website on the fly with the template and the DB content

I suppose that the less file level access we give the users the better, so maybe some kind of "interfased" access for whatever data outside the DB, like maybe no renaming files directly but its name in the DB and etc.
Or when uploading JPGs our system renames it and keep the "label name" on the DB for the user etc.

The WYSIWYG Editor will be as minimal as possible.
Websites are going to use our templates, users are going to want to upload photos at least.
And from there we can check some other type of data like PDFs and DOCs

[quantumphysics]

Originally Posted by jagarco

I'm very concerned on security, I know PHP/MySQL but not an expert, I'll be using Frameworks and work on this project for months.

The "your website" option of our SaaS is going to be "simple", they'll choose the template we'll have, create pages, enter txt/photos and that's it for now.

So, when accessing user1.maindomain.com our SaaS will "create" a website on the fly with the template and the DB content

I suppose that the less file level access we give the users the better, so maybe some kind of "interfased" access for whatever data outside the DB, like maybe no renaming files directly but its name in the DB and etc.
Or when uploading JPGs our system renames it and keep the "label name" on the DB for the user etc.

The WYSIWYG Editor will be as minimal as possible.
Websites are going to use our templates, users are going to want to upload photos at least.
And from there we can check some other type of data like PDFs and DOCs

The main thing was more "users being able to upload stuff to do cookies as yoursite.com, or ".yoursite.com" wildcarding, etc

[jagarco]

Originally Posted by quantumphysics

The main thing was more "users being able to upload stuff to do cookies as yoursite.com, or ".yoursite.com" wildcarding, etc

ok, sorry, I do know what cookies are for but can't yet grasp the whole picture of how cookies can affect our project.

I haven't yet dived into programming the project but I wanted to start on something very well planned.
(BTW, thank you very much for your attention on my subject)

[jagarco]

Originally Posted by quantumphysics

in any case do not use the same domain. if your site is example.com, use exampleusers.com or something. don't let them be on the same domain ever

Pardon if I start to look stubborn but, is just that what I see is that users using the main domain for their blog/site just as tumblr.com and wordpress.com do..., shouldn't be the right strategy?

But, you make it look like a "no no".

In which case is offering the main domain for their URL the right way?