Hi Leslie!

I have been through this as I have similar requirements to you.

Having read Tony's Vertical Solution Providers whitepaper and being a PowerDNN customer I elected to go with full installs for each "site"  I will have hundreds of "sites" when I am done rather than 1000's like you. So far this is what I've found:  I went with the entry level dedicated server from PowerDNN which has 1 gb of ram - so far I have 9 full installs on the server. With most of the sites unloaded I am close to using all of the ram - I haven't done the test of hitting all the sites at once yet.  So at this point I'm thinking that the full install route isn't the way to go.  But neither is the child portal route.

What I am thinking of doing is using a single DNN install and a traffic director module that will direct each user to the home page of their site when they log-in (each site has it's own role).  Each site's home page menu will only allow that site's users to access pages which belong to that site.  There are upsides and downsides to this solution - upgrading is much easier, server resources are much lower, but letting site admin's add web pages could get tricky. Site admin's can edit each page, add modules, etc.  I just have to figure out the adding pages/menu's issue.

Hope this helps

Greg

Hi Leslie,
You are correct about if  you're running a big site you should just stick to it being one portal per install.  Right now we're helping out one of the big names in the DotNetNuke community recover from a 700 portal install.  They had a large install and now we're going to help them cut it up into multiple installs because it is becoming unmanagable.

When it comes to the amount of RAM that a server needs, servers operate quite a bit different today than they used to.  As Leazon pointed out, when you start out, you may start using all of  your physical RAM right away, but that's ok - SQL Server and ASP.NET are designed to use all available memory - and then some.  I don't want to bore you with OS design concept stuff, but to give you an idea, we have a number of customers who put 50 or more separate DotNetNuke installs on a Power1 (entry level) dedicated server without a problem and even though they only have 1gb of physical ram in their server, they are using 8 gig of memory.  Each server's capacity is different depending on what is being done on it.

FYI - You might be interested to know that I was in a 5 hour dinner conversation last night here at Open Force and the biggest topic was how much portals suck.

Broadcasting from OpenForce,
Tony Valenti
PowerDNN DotNetNuke Hosting

Hi John,

Initally I will be on shared hosting. Once the site portal count would increase I would go the dedicated server route and eventually horizontally if that's what it takes.

My final questions are these;1

1. If I go down the road of all parent portals am I likely to suffer major performance hits.

2. If I go down the child portal route would these peform better.

3. Based on the answer above, if I go down the dedicated server and eventually horizontal route, could I scaled to 4000+ portals

4. If, I decide later on to split my DNN installs into say regions (like 6 regions) is there a way to export an entire portal and import it into another DNN install.

Thanks for your trusted opinons so far.