I have an off-topic question: This is the second company (after GitLab) I see with an “about” subdomain. Is this a new trend of using “about.x.com” for the marketing website and “x.com” for the web app? Is there a blog post or discussion about this?
At GitLab we first used www dot the marketing site and the apex for the app but many people assumed they would have the same content. That is why we introduced about. Cool to see we might have started a trend.
Browsers are thankfully highlighting the https-verified part of the URL (hostname) relative to the rest, so that a "paypal.com.fake.com" phishing attack is easier to spot. It was just a matter of time before UX people would put that highlighting to creative use. I like it.
On the technological side, I guess separate hostnames might make some ops things a little easier. But that alone can hardly be the reason. Easier and good looks can. Also: In a large scale outage, an about.x.com that is not running on your main cloud provider could be valuable for status updates, because far more people would know about about.x.com than about some status.x.com you might have if your "about" content was on the main hostname.
And I expected something which includes the subdomain part in the highlighting. Doing a little "TN-display dance" I see that Chrome highlights news.ycombinator.com, whereas Firefox only highlights ycombinator.com which kind of undermines my point (and seems slightly wrong to me, as this seems to be a certificate for the exact third level domain, not a wildcard under the second level).
