The meeting involved discussion on how to create additional prefixes to a subdomain so that every new company joining gets its own URL. Nathan wanted to understand the correct process of achieving this using Amazon AWS and referenced some preliminary documentation found within WeWeb, recommending the use of subdomains with a wildcard certificate for each.
They discussed the challenge of self-hosting to exercise control over this process and the need for automation. Tools mentioned in that regard included CloudFlare, Let's Encrypt, Netlify, Webflow, and GitHub. It was clarified that for every subdomain, a wildcard certificate would be necessary, obtainable at a cost from Let's Encrypt, for example. The conversation also touched on issues of various web hosting environments, cost implications, and availability. It was pointed out that although AWS offers great control as an infrastructure provider, figuring out how to make things work could be time-consuming. Therefore, services like DigitalOcean and CloudFlare were proposed as alternative solutions. The group also discussed the importance of managing exposure to the back-end service and the scalability of servers to facilitate global availability of the site under consideration. For scalability, focus was suggested on early needs rather than advanced planning. Tools mentioned in this regard include CDNs (Content Distribution Networks), CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, and Netlify. Concerns were raised about cloud-based web app hosting vendors' support for wildcard domains, which led to a conclusion of exploratory research on this topic.
(Source: Office Hours 10/5/2023 AM )
