I'd be curious to hear about this as well. I don't run more than a few sites in any of the installations I manage, but I'm not managing many sites for other people.

From a technical point of view I think the only thing that matters is the aggregate traffic and load from all the sites in an installation and how much load you can handle depends on how beefy the hardware is, how much processor and memory is available. There should be no difference between one site that gets a lot of traffic and a lot of little sites that aggregate to the same amount of traffic. It is just a matter of how many requests your installation gets and how well it can keep up and serve them, which sites or how many sites are generating the requests should not really matter within a single installation.

The only problems I think is if you get to a point where you have a lot of little sites and the aggregate traffic is approaching the capacity of the server to serve the requests, then if one of the low traffic sites begins to skyrocket in traffic and is suddenly a high traffic site all by itself, then you would need to split if off onto another server.

I certainly wouldn't get carried away with tons of sites in a single shared hosting installation. With a dedicated server you can monitor how hard the machine is working and migrate sites to another box if the server is getting too much load.

To me the only downside of hosting a bunch of different customer sites in one installation is that you don't have data separation so it isn't easy to give a client a backup of only his own data. You would have to backup the whole db, restore it to a different name, then try to purge out the data from other customers, then create another backup to give the customer. It can be done but its a hassle and requires care to make sure you don't include any data you shouldn't in the backup.

Best,

Joe

Hi Guys,

There are no absolute numbers about how many sites it can handle. As I said before it all depends on the hardware capacity to serve pages and the aggregate amount of traffic. A load test on one machine can't tell you how much traffic another machine can handle.

The "500 site limit" is a misnomer, really what it boils down to is that for each site there must be a sitemaprovider declared with a different name for each site, and we have set these up in a separate file that hangs off of Web.config, in mojoSiteMap.config. The names expected are based on the site ids, and basically we have pre-hard coded names for up to 500 sites thinking that should be enough and no-one will likely have to edit it to add more. But depending on the hardware and the amount of traffic the sites generated there is really no fixed limit to the number of sites, it is conceivable to handle more than 500 low traffic sites on a beefy enough server infrastructure. A real beefy web server combined with a sql server cluster should be able to handle gobs of traffic.

Best,

Joe