Posted by ddease2 on December 11, 2008 at 8:32pm
I use a multi-site install.
20% (3 votes)
I use individual Drupal installs for each site.
40% (6 votes)
I use both, depending on the hosting situation.
40% (6 votes)
Total votes: 15
Comments
we tend to go more
we tend to go more single-install, as each site tends to go on a different host.
@modulist
I like multi-site
I like multi-site were it works. Easier to upgrade
Joe Moraca
Joe Moraca
WebDevGeeks.com
Multi-site upgrades can kill you
We are actually migrating from multi-site to individual installs because we can't always afford to upgrade all of our sites at exactly the same time.
Upgrading
So this is my obivous question, I have around 8 sites going now, most of which are on the same server but some are on their own hosted servers. Am I just being anal by updating every module and core when it becomes available? I find myself spending as much time updating these sites as designing and maintaining them! Am I alone here, or is this par for the course?
Antgiant, when you say you can't afford to upgrade all your sites at the same time, what exactly is the time consumer? Because I haven't performed a multi-site install yet, I don't understand what takes the time? I thought the one (and only) benefit to the multi-site install was that it saved time with modules and core installs? Are there other issues that I need to consider in real-life application?
Dan Dease
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You have some options
If you're spending that much time you really have three options:
1) do a multisite install, and make that a cornerstone of your site deployment
2) outsource maintenance and work with Acquia or another managed solution, which is where we're pushing out big academic clients
3) turn off status_update and update modules monthly, or when there's a new core release.
We found it to be too costly to keep up religiously with all of our dev sites.
@modulist
RE: Upgrading
Multi-site upgrades have a few problems. First you have to take all of your sites offline at the same time and bring them back up one at a time, as their databases get upgraded. (So your apparent downtime is increased for some of your sites.)
Second, and what really hurt us, all your sites have to be on the same core code base. We needed some features from 6 for one of our sites and couldn't afford the time to upgrade every single one of our multi-sites to 6 at the same time. But with multi-site we didn't have that choice, it was all or nothing. So we decided that a few extra files was well worth the additional flexibility.
Thanks for the input
I have read online that there are file security concerns with multi-site installs. Has anyone had this experience? Any comments on multi-site security in general?
Thanks all
Dan Dease
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