Folks, I'm looking for some ideas.
I currently play "site admin" for four different web sites. They are all physically located in different web hosting accounts with the same web host. All of them are running Drupal. My role with all of them is to keep Drupal and the necessary modules and themes up-to-date and to establish the structure and functionality of the site. It's someone else's job to create and manage content using the tools that Drupal provides. All of these sites are for not-for-profit organizations and I'm not making any money from them...just covering expenses.
My dilemma is that I have four Drupal installations to maintain. That's a bit of a PITA. A new module version comes out and I have to upload it and install it here, then upload and install it there, etc. It's even more fun when I decide to upgrade Drupal. I stuck at 5.1 for a long time before I finally updated all of the sites to 5.7.
I'm fairly adept with Drupal multi-site installations (one code base, separate databases). Does it make sense to consolidate all of these sites into one multi-site installation? Bandwidth might be an issue with one of the sites, but it'd still be within the bandwidth limits that most shared hosting accounts offer.
Is there an downside to multi-site?
Other thoughts?
Bob...
Comments
not certain
I think the main "downside" for most people with multi-site is simply ignorance of how to set it up successfully. However, since you know how to run a multi-site installation, it seems logical to go with that setup. The only other difficulty that I can think of is that all the sites will have to be on the same version of Drupal. If one site depends on a module that is not ported to Drupal 6, then you will have to keep all of them at Drupal 5. That's the only one that I can think of right now.
I have never setup a multi-site installation myself, so I am uncertain of any difficulties that might arise in a change-over from separate code bases to one code base. Good luck with your endeavor.
-Mike Goodwin
Red Leaf Media
http://www.redleafmedia.com
I recently got a multi-site
I recently got a multi-site installation set-up through LiquidWeb and have been very happy with the result. All of the sites need to be on the same codebase, but it is possible to have multiple version of Drupal Core in different folders. You'd have to do some legwork to get that working, but if having a 6.x and 5.x available is needed then it may be worth it. LiquidWeb has been absolutely amazing for me, and I only have their lowest package of $15/mo. Go checkout their site and see if it will fit your needs. If your non-profit organizations are paying it then you may put it on one account and manage all of them. You could then charge them for monthly hosting and maybe even make a little money off of it. Those are just my thoughts.
Andrew
amariotti.com
Andrew (amariotti)
hostmonster is an option
hostmonster is an option too. I have used them and they seem to be pretty decent. However the only downside with them is that they do not support ffmpeg and other media related requirements if you plan to have folks port videos and such. I pay $120/year and there is no limit on how many domains you can host.
Hi bb37 Are these 4
Hi bb37
Are these 4 different entities, meaning they do not know eachother? If so, I doubt they will want to share a server with someone else and the lag that comes with multi-site setups. I haven't seen any benchmarks for multi-site setups but it has been mentioned and thought that a multi-site setup could perform a little slower than a normal setup.
My main concern with the above suggestions is sharing codebase or a server account with other companies I do not have an affiliation with.
I am not sure if you are interested, but, I provide hosting. For 501(c) entities I give a bit of discount. Email me if you want more info.
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Elvis McNeely
Blogging about Drupal and web development: http://www.elvisblogs.org/drupal
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Thanks for replies. Much
Thanks for replies. Much food for thought.
All of the sites are currently at the same version of Drupal...5.7. I won't be upgrading to 6.x until a couple of key modules are upgraded to the 6.x level. That's what makes the multi-site idea appealing to me since I'd have just one Drupal installation and one set of module installations to worry about.
Yes, all four entities are separate. There's no ecommerce on any of these sites for the forseeable future and there aren't any competitive issues between the entities as they are in different areas of interest.
One of them spiked up to 12GB of bandwidth last month, but it should settle back down to about 0.5GB/month in a few months. This is with around 50,000 hits/month. Another has much lower bandwidth, but runs about 100,000 hits/month. I had considered that there might be a performance issue with a multi-site set-up, so that's point to ponder.
Bob...
multisite getting started
mikegoodwin,
I am about to set up my first multisite in a few weeks. I have done quite some research about how to cleanly do it, but I did not find one good step by step thing, or (better) a screencast of it.
Though I am not a 100% sure of how to this and that, my first multisite will be born in a sandbox environment first. If i can manage it, I could try to make a screencast of the process.
some facts:
Drupal 5
shared: users, userpoints, privatemessages
Helping modules:
http://drupal.org/project/sitecss
http://drupal.org/project/singlesignon
Still not figured out: how to link to profile only on site A (teamsugar.com does this)
Well, if i really can make a screencast of how to do this, i'll post it here.
My 2Cents worth
First off : Congratulations on having the busiest most active and longest thread in the history of the group.
May I propose that we start our own server Co-Op? for about $800 we could have a mac-server which we could co-locate in a high speed location for around $60 per month.
We could each have unlimited domains and we could split the costs evenly and keep it fair.
Here's what it might look like
Server Mac Mini: 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo/1GB/120GB -- $799 https://support.macminicolo.net/jvmx_secure_signup
Server Management Software "webmin" http://www.webmin.com/ the free alternative to cpanel or plesque
Monthly fees $64.98 this coveres 6 IP addresses, remote power reset, see https://support.macminicolo.net/jvmx_secure_signup for more
We can discuss an external drive for backup OR a raid-1. this would cost more.
The above scenario is $137 per person for the server [assuming 6 of us]
and the monthly portion would barely be $10/mo
Each of us would have our own IP address for the server. this is crucial for muti-sites
The rates I'm quoting are from a locater in Vegas. I can hit up MidWestInternet to see if they can match the price. It would be nice to keep the server local.
This server would be optimized for Drupal and allow a much easier procedure to setup multi-sites.
What do you think of that?
- dv
LiquidWeb
I've recently started running multisite on LiquidWeb also and I've been very pleased with their support. I'm using their VPS package.
Graydon