By nwsunni on

Hello --

Background:

I'm not new to web site building but I am new to CMS. I'm planning to convert three sites to Drupal. Two are owned by me and will be hosted at the same web hosting company The third belongs to someone else. There's a strong probability that the third site will be hosted by a different web hosting company. I will, though, do my darndest to assure that the specs of both providers match for OS, apache, PhP and mySQL.

I have installed Apache2Triad onto my local, desktop PC and will build locally on production sites.

Question

I'm thinking, given my reading here, that I should use Drupal multi-site set-up to build the three sites on my local computer. Correct?

If that is correct, then will it be difficult for me to "associate" two sites with one hosting company and the remaining site with yet another hosting company? All three will have separate domain names, also.

Any other tips for me, so I don't get travelling in the wrong direction?

Thanks in advance!!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

You should not use multisite unless (a) you know what you're doing, and (b) you intend to host all the sites on the same server, at the same IP address, in the same directory space.

nwsunni’s picture

nwsunni commented

Thanks for the response. (I also enjoyed my spin through your blog. We're in the same age bracket; my degree's in journalism and I have taught for more than a decade in j-school; did the newspaper route years ago; a question mark flew over my head when I saw the Cowles reference. I digress, though.... )

So, I'll need several instances of drupal on my local computer, it appears. Bummer.

Ciao...

lhtown’s picture

lhtown commented

There are few reasons to do a multisite and a number of decent ones not to.

First of all, consider that if you do a multisite, you will have to upgrade all of your sites at the same time. Depending on available modules and other things that may or may not work for you.

The main advantage of multisite installations seems to be that you only have to upgrade drupal once for all of your sites. That is nice, but hardly a compelling reason for someone running three or four site with distinct characteristics and needs.

However, if you have hundreds of sites all running the same group of modules, it could be a godsend.

Basically, it seems to be one of those features that, if you have to ask, you don't need it.

HotDrupal.com’s picture

HotDrupal.com commented

> First of all, consider that if you do a multisite, you will have to upgrade
> all of your sites at the same time. Depending on available modules and
> other things that may or may not work for you.

This is probably the #1 reason that a lot of my customers *don't* do multisite, and one of the first things I mention to them when they ask about it. For the most part they have three or four websites, and keeping up the unique installs isn't a lot of overhead in the long run versus this point.

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