Create Site Collections with or without Sites Folder

Question

I just needed to clarify some things....

When creating a new site collection you could neither have

http://sitename.domain.com/

or

http://sitename.domain.com/sites/intranet

Are there any differences in this and if so what are the advantages /disadvantages? Also when i create a new site collection why does it automatically give me this URL

http://sitename.domain.com/sitepages/home.aspx

How can i create a new site collection without having sitepages/home.aspx

All i want is http://sitename.domain.com/default.aspx which is what use to happen in version 2007

Answer 1

Besides the length of URL, there are no advantages/disadvantages to creating a site collection in either place.

The site collection at http://sitename.domain.com/ is the "root" site collection for that web application, but it doesn't have any special properties.

Site collections under "/sites" are simply site collections created under a "sites" managed path for the web application.

As for the "sitepages", that's just a list/library that holds pages and is created as part of certain site templates. If you use the "blank site", you will end up with a page at http:///sites/blanksite/default.aspx