Finding a new webhost.

[MJEggertson]

I believe subdomains are useful for keeping cookies seperate, without the need to apply strict paths to them. I'm not positive though, because I don't use cookies at my sites.

Also useful for differentiating emails, if you have lots of users. someone@mydomain.com is different from someone@mysub.mydomain.com.

Personally, I just use them to store unrelated things as a matter of organization. Not a big deal for a 50 meg site, but it's just habit, I'm a computer-neat-freak. Don't much care about any of the other benefits a subdomain has (if any).

 

[Fast Learner]

I've not used them, but if you're someone who's tired of their hosting provider shutting down, you'll likely never have the problem with Yahoo:

GeoCities Advantage
• Domain name
• 100MB disk space
• 25GB of data transfer/mo
• Business Edition email at your domain
(e.g., you@your-name.com)
• 15 subdomains
• Customizable site search
• PHP4/MySQL, access logs, password protection, snapshot backups, and much more!
$19.95/mo
plus one-time setup fee $25

Note, though, that they only provide 5 (!!!) email addresses (but you can access them through the very nice Yahoo Mail interface, and without any ads, of course).

Again, to clarify, I'm sure there are better deals. I only suggest these guys as a possibility if you're tired of moving your site(s).

 

[Arnix]

You would also use a sub domain to seperate certain sections of your site, or to do distributed hosting (part of site on one web server, another part on another web server).

If you had player info you could have players.mydomain.com instead of mydomain.com/players (a waste) or you could host player info off of a free site and have player.mydomain.com pointing to it, but maintaining you main site on the mydomain.com's host. This could help for bandwidth or speed issues. Split heavy traffic sections up on multiple cheap site with low bandwidth restriction and it will appear as one site, but using different bandwidths.

You could also have a sub domain pointing to the cgi-bin directory so that people don't see it as a cgi-bin. Something like apps.mydomain.com or cgi.mydomain.com. This would allow for people to not be able to view the true directory structure to your cgi-bin (low grade security). In this case you could have all the cgi's running from a different site than your main page, so if the cgi's screw something up, the whole site won't go down.

Hope that didn't sound like ramblings.


Arnix (tm)