The 2026 Drupal Business Survey is open. Your response will help shape the future of the Drupal business ecosystem.In December 2008 blackdog asked about.....Domain Access module with 200+ domains?
nonsie said ......I've found some workarounds that work for me with 120 ish sites we have at the moment.
But that is where the thread ended.
I have been searching for information on this subject.
I am looking to provide a Small Town portal site to promote the businesses and clubs in our area could be between 100 and 200 subdomain sites.
The front page would have latest offers, shop of the day, club news , local events etc . Each site would be restricted to say 5 pages about their business.
From the answer I was given in the forum It seems the Domain Access module would be the best answer.
Since I need to be able to pull content from the sub domain sites onto the main domain home page.
Before I offer this site to my local community I need to be sure that, if the site was to take off the Domain Access module would not fall over.
Its now over a year since the original subject was raised so had anyone any more experience with many domains.
sorry if this is the wrong place to post but I am new to Drupal and do not want to start a project then find I have a lot of problems at a later date.
Comments
Comment #1
agentrickardWe've addressed all the usability concerns that have come up. So I wouldn't worry there.
The biggest problem you might have is with database queries if you end up with millions of nodes (or millions of rows in the {node_access} table). But that can be mitigated with a good database and caching strategy.
I'd be interested to head what the largest domain counts are these days, too.
Comment #2
nonsieI think my largest site is at 136 atm and is supposedly planned for another 40+.
I don't think you will have any issues with 200+ domains since we took care of the UI issues that were a nightmare to deal with before. I would be a bit more cautious as you add other node access modules. Also everything that involves i18n at least doubles the number of queries. Stay away from large translatable taxonomies and you'll do just fine;)
Comment #3
remus1 commentedMany thanks to both of you for your help.
The site will only be in English so no problem with translations.
I will now get back to my Drupal learning curve! But I must say I like what I have seen so far.
Thanks again
Kevin.
Comment #4
agentrickardI'll leave this open a few days to see if anyone else has feedback.
Comment #5
Nigeria commented1. Is the a reasonable maximum limit to the number of domain/subdomains? We are planning two seperate installations. One may potentially include over 1000 domain/subdomains.
2. What database settings/strategy should one implement for really large installations?
Comment #6
remus1 commentedSorry if its off subject but a question to nonsie or anyone with a large number of sub sites.
1. what type of hosting server are you using, dedicated, virtual
2 what size eg memory and bandwith per month / year
I now have my demo site working with domain access. now I need to get costing on the server to give to my client.
Thank Kevin
Comment #7
blackdog commentedWe're running a DA site with about 200 domains, and it works just fine. The recent UI fixes really made the administration alot easier, and performance wise I'd say it's not any different from running a single site with lots of visitors.
We're using two virtual servers, one for apache and one for the database. We're using APC as both an op-code cache and memory cache, since we're on a single web server. YMMV though, since you have to consider the amount of logged in vs. anonymous users. You can serve a s**tload of anonymous users from a single server, but it's when you have lots of logged in users you wanna be prepared to scale, but this isn't specifik to a DA site, it's the same for any site.
Comment #8
agentrickard