Date First Published: 15th January 2022
Topic: Computer Networking
Topic: Network Identifiers
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 6/10
A subdomain, also known as a child domain, refers to a smaller domain that is part of another domain, such as "blog.example.com" (it would be part of the domain name, example.com). Subdomains can be used to categorise and organise different sections of a website. For example, in "blog.mysite.com", "mysite.com" is the domain name, "blog" is the subdomain, and ".com" is the TLD. In addition, they can be used for free options on web hosting as most hosting providers provide people with free subdomains.
If you don't own a domain name, it's okay to use a subdomain for a small or temporary website that is provided free of charge by a hosting provider, such as examplesite54.wordpress.com or examplesite.w3spaces.com. However, subdomains often result in long URLs and do not look as professional as custom domains.
Also, if you switched hosting providers and used a subdomain, you would have to change the URL of your website to the subdomain provided by the other hosting provider, and people might not know the new URL. As a result, if your free subdomain was indexed by search engines and you switched hosting providers, it would cause a permanenent URL change without a redirect, causing all bookmarked links, external links, and indexed URLs to become broken and you would have to start the whole SEO process again.
For a business website, it is highly recommended to use a custom domain name, as these will look more professional and if you ever need to change your hosting provider, your domain name will stay the same. With a business website, one of the reasons why a domain is registered is to prevent someone from copying it or taking the domain name to prevent the owner of the business from registering it, known as domain squatting. For more information about whether it is possible to have a website without registering a domain name, see this article.
If so, it is important that you tell me as soon as possible on this page.
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