The problem presented to me at a recent planning and design session was somewhat unique in the following requirements:
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The client served 5 divisions who wanted separate presentation, content-centric web sites and collaborative web sites/portals.
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The presentation sites could share the same application for all divisions with a taxonomy of division/site.
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The collaboration sites needed to be isolated on separate applications but still maintain a taxonomy indicating the sites by division.
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Both types of sites and taxonomies needed to use the same domain name, say foo.com.
The solution, after some thought, wasn’t nearly as complex as appeared initially but involved both SharePoint URL organization and some DNS planning.
The presentation sites were organized with managed paths of division1, division2, division3, division4 and division5:
www.foo.com/division1/site1, www.foo.com/division2/site1, etc.
This gave the possibility of more than enough individual site collections under each division and an expandable but contiguous taxonomy.
To address requirement 3, I created child domains for each division:
Division1.foo.com, division2.foo.com, etc.
This permitted the application isolation for collaboration by creating site1.division1.foo.com, site2.division1.foo.com, etc.
Should requirement 3 be interpreted to only require isolation of each division’s collaborative sites as a whole, then applications could be created named division1, division2, etc instead of child domains and the site collections be organized either in a “sites” managed path as division1.foo.com/sites/site1 or an additional layer of the taxonomy be added to the managed paths of each division application.
I hope this mental exercise of organizing your site collections with both managed paths in one direction of the URL and DNS naming in the other URL direction will be helpful in planning your SharePoint URL taxonomy.