Ask HN: Should a company have separate domains for the product and corporate?

3 points by dfrankow 4 years ago | 7 comments
Should a tech company have separate domains for the product and corporate?

For example: facebook.com (product) and fb.com (corporate).

Possible factors:

* SEO of a combined site might be better

* Perhaps security of separate sites might be better

** EDIT: And why?

  • mr-wendel 4 years ago
    I think it depends on the type of business you're operating. In many -- most -- cases, the brand is basically the product and arbitrarily separating them out is only going to add to confusion and extra work.

    In other cases you may have multiple, "first class" products that are independent of each other and your identity as the provider of those products. I'd definitely separate it then.

    Unasked, but I think relevant: you should absolutely separate out your infrastructure from both your product and business. To carry your analogy forward, there would be facebook.net, fb.net, or perhaps even some code word thats used to refer to internal resources (servers, internal tools and resources, etc). It's fine if they're indirectly exposed to end-users or easily discovered.

    • dfrankow 4 years ago
      > separate out your infrastructure from both your product and business

      By infra, you mean for example a postgres DB? That makes sense. Don't want marketing to take down your website with a mail merge.

      • mr-wendel 4 years ago
        Yes, anything relating to the technical underpinnings should definitely be split off into its own domain(s). It's almost guaranteed you'll thank yourself for it down the road... and its usually sooner than you'd think.

        Obviously some brand/product domains are related to the technical implementation (e.g. load balancers are going to be using them) so there is no perfect boundary -- but there usually is a clear one.

        • dfrankow 4 years ago
          Now I'm confused.

          I thought you meant split the infra pieces into different software components (process, machine, etc.), not split them by domain. Can you give an example, and why it's good to split by domain?

    • tsjq 4 years ago
      Definitely, yes.
      • dfrankow 4 years ago
        Can you provide detail or examples of why?