A subdomain is any name placed to the left of your registered domain, such as blog.example.com, app.example.com or www.example.com. Once you own a domain, you can create as many subdomains as you want at no extra cost by adding DNS records.
Subdomains are commonly used to separate services: a help center on one platform, a store on another, and a web app on your own servers. Each subdomain can point to a different host using A, AAAA or CNAME records.
Keep in mind that search engines may treat subdomains somewhat independently from the main site, and that a wildcard SSL certificate (*.example.com) covers one level of subdomains but not the bare domain unless it is listed separately.
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Related terms
- Registrar
- A registrar is a company accredited to sell and manage domain registrations on behalf of customers, such as Namecheap, Porkbun or Cloudflare.
- Registry
- A registry is the organization that operates a top-level domain, maintaining its database of names and setting wholesale prices and policies.
- ICANN
- ICANN is the nonprofit that coordinates the global domain name system, accredits registrars and sets policy for generic top-level domains.
- WHOIS
- WHOIS is a protocol and lookup service that shows registration details for a domain, such as registrar, dates, nameservers and (sometimes) owner info.