Subdomains are the way to go. After 5 years of trying to house web applications within subdirectories of subdirectories of sites for our university, we've grow

Subdomains are the way to go. After 5 years of trying to house web applications within subdirectories of subdirectories of sites for our university, we've grown tired of the endless configuration nightmares that many apps require. Sticking a new folder of static pages somewhere is trivial, but configuring Rails apps, forums, third party services, and other things we purchase to work properly at the subdirectory level is so much more painful. It often involves reverse proxy settings and content rewriting, which doesn't always play nice if the directory structure is uneven. So now we have subdomains. We have a wildcard set up that forwards to our app servers, we have scripts that create the vhost file and tap Apache to restart, and no proxies need to be modified to allow /foo/bar/baz to go to server1.foo.com. When I managed a handful of apps, subfolders were nice Everything under www was great for SEO and everything else. But the fact is that users don't care about URLs, our sites on subdomains get found by search engines because we link to them, and if we need to move foobarapp to another more powerful box (or to the cloud) it's WAY easier.