Any reason NOT to use a multisite?

Posted by Branndon on April 10, 2010 at 3:09pm

I am creating websites for businesses. I have experimented with multi site installs before. I have one domain website.com and have used that to host all the drupal code for a few other sites.

Anyway I want to know if there are any negatives for multi sites? I have tons of modules, I'd like to have every module to be available to new sites, and when I have to update those modules, only do it at the main site, not at 10 different drupal installations.

Thanks for your time.

Comments

here are my cons to multisite

Posted by johnbarclay on April 10, 2010 at 11:08pm

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My experience is that single sites are easier to maintain than multisites; provided you are using command line tools such as drush or cvs for updates.

Path issues and version control issues related to domain changes and dev to prod moves can be a pain, especially with certain modules such as civicrm. Many of these issues will be resolved in Drupal 7.

Often 2 sites will need different minor versions of a module such as Biblio for very good reasons; multisite installs make this difficult to maintain.

The core install is only 100MB and is easily updated via CVS or SVN

Clients want flexibility in when a patches and upgrades are made. This is problematic in multisite installs.

site process and user isolation can be more difficult to setup.

www.johnbarclay.com

I much prefer multi-sites

Posted by Sunshiney on April 12, 2010 at 3:23pm

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I much prefer multi-sites set-up, now that I have installed the D-6 patch which solves the path problem from dev to live. That patch will be in 7 but it sure eliminated the headache Barclay posted about. I am running multisite on a linode VPS; I wouldn't go that direction in shared hosting. I suspect the decision is based on your client and hosting situation. We are hosting clients and some of our own sites at linode, providing the back-end support for them. A different scenario would, perhaps, change the how-to's. Updating ten plus core installs and more modules...well, that t'aint my idea of fun...but again, the decision depends on your situation, imho.