Advantages of using different domain for customers in a multi tenant environment

Question

If I want a multi-tenant environment where customers can create subdomains, what are the pros and cons of creating those subdomains under myexample.com if my main company domain is example.com?

I noticed that Shopify uses myshopify.com under which their create subdomains for their customers.

Answer 1

Coupled with the fact that this is better for security,, it certainly appears that there's a pattern and good reason why companies do this.

Here are some examples:

• Shopify
  • Uses shopify.com for marketing and myshopify.com for subdomain.
• Basecamp
  • Uses basecamphq.com for marketing and basecamp.com for subdomains.
• Intercom Articles
  • Uses intercom.com for marketing and intercom.help for subdomains.
• Harvest
  • Uses getharvest.com for marketing and harvestapp.com for subdomains.
• Status.io
  • Uses statuspage.io for marketing and statuspagestaging.com for subdomains.

Also this article points out the issue with untrusted content (as is the case with Shopify:

Although cookie domains do help to limit the scope of your cookies, it is still best to avoid having untrusted hosts under your domain. This is why GitHub pages are hosted under github.io, not github.com, for example.

Answer 2

I suspect the web domain name prefixed by 'my' is purly emotional rather than technical. It's in the back-end that the domains need to be different, as a resource for enforcing security. There needs to be at least a production and an internal domain. A full suite might be Dev, DevQA, UAT, production and internal domains, with a limited number of people being able to transfer code and/or data across domains.