mojoPortal can easily host multiple sites using 1 web installation and 1 database.

Each site is completely independent, having separate users, roles, content, and skinning. The first site is considered the master site and all additional sites are considered child sites, but this is only in terms of global administration. The master site can manage the Site Settings and configure which features are available for child sites and is the site used to create the child sites, but no users or content are shared across the sites. Child sites can also manage their own Site Settings but cannot install features or manage other child sites.

Advantages

One of the primary advantages of hosting multiple sites using mojoPortal is that all the sites run in a single application domain and therefore consume less server resources than if you setup separate IIS or Apache web sites. Each web site gets its own application instance and this carries some overhead in terms of server resources.

Limitations

As is often the case, the very thing that is an advantage noted above comes with a corresponding limitation. Since the multiple sites are actually one site in terms of application boundaries, certain things like ASP.NET themes are cached globally and are therefore shared across sites.

In mojoPortal most of the issues related to this have been mitigated because we generally only use the theme.skin files only to set css classes instead of setting specific style properties. This works great because different mojoPortal "skins" use the same css class names but each can style that class differently so there is no conflict at all.

Another good reason for only assigning css class names in themes and not setting any other specific style properties in the theme is because when you do set style properties in the theme, ASP.NET renders those properties inline in the html markup and this increases the amount of markup (and therefore page size) unneccessarily which hurts performance. Keeping all the style properties in css is the most efficient way to keep the markup of the rendered page lean.

If your hosting provider enforces a Medium trust policy, hosting multiple sites on 1 web installation will not work correctly but you can still use 1 database as long as you have separate physical web installations at the same host.

How To

There are 2 ways to establish additional sites with mojoPortal, using different host names for each site, or using virtual folders to define the additional sites.

For more information about using Host names to define sites see:

Multiple Sites Based on Host Names

For more information about using Folder names to define sites see:

Multiple Sites Based on Folder Names