CODEWITHSUNDEEP
static-librariesscalingsubdomain
brsbilgic
brsbilgic

Reputation: 11833

Advantages of having css,js and media subdomains

What is the benefits of seperating css,js and media folders under subdomains like 

css.domain-name.com
js.domain-name.com
media.domain-name.com

I know that scalibilty begin from static/media files but does serving them from subdomain has any advantage ?

If so, in which degree should I do that ? For example, if I allowed to photo uploads, should I put my "uploads" folder under media subdomain ?

Thanks

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2184

Answers (3)

Mario
Mario

Reputation: 36517

I'd separate uploads from static files used in the generic layout (e.g. logos, icons, etc.) so its a lot easier to clear the existing files to upload a new design without having to care for the uploads to not be deleted/overwritten.

As for the domain names, I wouldn't split the files that way. One sub domain for static files, one for uploads - fine. But I wouldn't go as far as adding one for scripts or stylesheets.

Using sub domains can have advantages though, depending on the web server you can configure the whole virtual host to adhere to specific rules, e.g. not providing directory listings or not allowing access to any files other than images - or refusing to deliver hotlinked files (without having to worry about specific sub directories). It can as well make it easier to move the files to another host later on, e.g. for media files or downloads to a cloud hosting service.

Considering your example I'd use the following sub domains:

www.domain-name.com (basic web presence)
static.domain-name.com or media.domain-name.com (serving support files like js, css, images, etc. - stuff that doesn't change and can be cached for a long time)
uploads.domani-name.com (serving uploaded files)

Don't overcomplicate it as you're not gaining any additional performance that way (unless utilizing different servers and you're expecting heavy load). In fact page load might be slower (due to additional DNS lookups) and you might encounter security limitations, e.g. regarding cookie validity/accessibility or cross domain scripting.

Upvotes: 3

fyr
fyr

Reputation: 20869

There are mainly two reasons for doing this

  1. Scaling - static content and dynamic content has other scaling parameters. The more you may differ between webservers serving dynamic and static contents. Based on this you may scale different based on your websites requirements. E.g if you host a photo site you will end up having 10times more static servers than dynamic sites. Static servers are usually much more lightweight than full featured application servers.
  2. Cookies - Cookies are always sent to the domain they are assigned to. So cookies will be sent to e.g. www.xyz.com and not to sub.xyz.com

Probably it makes no sense to go more into detail than static[1-n].xyz.com. But that really depends on what you want to do.

To you "upload" folder question. Preferable the images uploaded to your main domain will be served by a static server (serving contents on your subdomain).

Upvotes: 1

Lucero
Lucero

Reputation: 60236

For JS, this seems like a bad idea. There are security restrictions to what you can do using JS when dealing with a different domain, which would be the case here.

For media files and downloads, basically BLOB storage, the story is a bit different. For high-traffic sites, it may be required to separate this in order to create a good load-balancing structure and to avoid putting unnecessary load on the web application servers (the media subdomain can point to different servers, thus reducing the load on the app servers while allowing to create massive load balancing for just the binary data serving).

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions