Selfhosted

I prefer subdomains, personally. A lot of services expect to run on the root of the web server, so although you can sometimes configure them to use a path, it's kind of a pain.

Also, migrating services from one server to another will be a lot easier with subdomains since all you have to do is change the A and AAAA records. I use ZeroTier for a lot of my services, and that's really nice since, even if I move a container to another machine, the container's ZeroTier IP address will stay the same, so I don't even need to update DNS. With paths, migration would involve a lot more work.

The only problem with using paths is the service might not support it (ie it might generate absolute URLs without the path in, rather than using relative URLs).

Subdomains is probably the cleanest way to go.

Try not to use paths, you'll have some weird cross-interactions when two pieces of software set the same cookie (session cookies for example), which will make you reauthenticate for every path.

Subdomains are the way to go, especially with wildcard DNS entries and DNS-01 letsencrypt challenges.

I've kinda been trimming the amount of services I've exposed through subdomains, it grew so wild because it was pretty easy. I'd just set a wildcard subdomains to my ip and the caddy reverse proxy created the subdomains.

Just have a wildcard A record that points *. to your ip address.

Even works with nested domains like "home." and then "*.home"

in addition to all other good comments - if you will ever decide to move out service to another server or something like that - moving subdomains will be much easier.

You can make a wildcard domain and point it to the reverse proxy to route based on SNI. That works if you have HTTPS sites only. Just an idea.

I use traefik with subdomains and everywhere I go I see people use subdomains, not sure

Depends on the usage and also service. I'm using subfolders for all my Tasmota switches. Like https://switch.domain.org/garage this makes it easier to maintain because I don't need to mess around with a new subdomain for ever new device. On the other side, I like unique services on a subfomain: video or audio. I can switch the application behind, but the entry point remains.

Everyone is saying subdomains so I'll try to give a reason for paths. Using subdomains makes local access a bit harder. With paths you can use httpS://192etc/example, but if you use subdomains, how do you connect internally with https? Https://example.192etc won't work as you can't mix an ip address with domain resolution. You'll have to use http://192etc:port. So no httpS for internal access. I got around this by hosting adguard as a local DNS and added an override so that my domain resolved to the local IP. But this won't work if you're connected to a VPN as it'll capture your DNS requests, if you use paths you could exclude the IP from the VPN.

Edit: not sure what you mean by "more setup", you should be using a reverse proxy either way.

@Sekoia I like using subdomains as it is easy to configure in a lot of services. Also, easier to remember if you are giving the URL to someone for access.