A post regarding the use of child portals on dnn was raised on the DNN forums – and to ensure that I didn’t create any confusion (a comment was made about how I was commenting, and I didn’t have a spare 2 hours to redefine the post, so if you are an absolute newbie, you may not understand this comment completely)
The original post is here – It might be worth reading if you want to learn about the use of child portals in a reseller / marketing environment and whether or not they should be considered. I have my own thoughts on the matter – and this is the original response to the post – which then resulted in comments on the ‘confusion’ I may have caused.
I will try to maintain my posting consistency on DNN but I think once again, I”ll have to simply post here and not make the core team unhappy how I write.. 
For those who want to know more about CHILD & PARENT portals -
HERE IS ANOTHER BLOG ABOUT IT.
NOT FOR THE BEGINNER
I’ve been using full and child portals for years – it depends on the project and I can only give you my personal experience here, but since I’ve done literally hundreds and hundreds of sites, if not thousands, a mix of full parent portals, child portals, ecommerce portals, email marketing portals, brochure style sites, mini fixed page sites, custom module delivery, single client sites who have many sub sites, franchise type sites with global parent portal and then children portal under, parent portals with ‘global’ management to deliver ads through child portals, but give site owners some management, directory style portals, budget reseller portal infrastructure… I’ve done a few and there are some signficant rule of thumb approaches to be taken.
I’ve built sites for my own clients, for developers and sent them portals which have been created into child portals for their clients, developed ‘build and deploy’ instances for businesses and individuals, some are hosted with me, others packaged and delivered to their own hoster, developed and built specific, optimised and slick portals for resellers (some hosted, some not) as well as SEOifiying dnn where possible on others.. so I think I can give some useful, hands on experience advice for those who want to look at child portals but feel that not knowing makes them hesitant in giving it a try.
Server specs – if you’re going to be serious about running your own child portals en mass, you need to be sure you have the server infrasturcture to handle this – because most problems do arise when dnn meets its threshold of what is good and what turns into sleepless nights wondering if the site is going to be running in the morning. Fortunately – these can be resolved with … feed the machine ram… So, make sure your hosting is in place. I run about 220 dbs and perhaps 300 sites and have spent the last month or so changing my infrastructure so I can have a single portal run some domain names I have – that could be perhaps 250 completely non related to dnn small portals that will hang off one release – it’s more cost effective to run this way and management is much easier.
Type of customers – who are they? You might run with 1/2 dozen types of ‘child portal’ installs – and use that as your base – as your clients grow you can strip them from it and give them their own single portal. I have just spent yesterday splitting dnnskins.com from it’s child portal instance, since I have staff who manage the skins and uploading, and I wanted to upgrade in time the previews of DNN skins to be on dnn 5, but dont’ want to upgrade my site to dnn 5, so I ended up replicating the site so I have two builds – one with just a single install of dnnskins with 75,600 users, and, the instance which I had run with for 18 months or so, with 75 child portals on there, which was causing my logs to get large, inability to really tweak the site and in reality – if i want to market that site, which I am going to start doing now, then I needed to ensure the portal was working at all times, and if I send out 20,000 emails at a time, I want to make sure that the site performance is maintained – but it served me well and therefore has given me reason to believe that child portals is a super cool way to manage your infrastructure.
Who are the type of clients who would use child portals – ones that typically don’t require depth of registration, or single user sites, where they have a few site administrators, brochure sites, favours you pull for those who give you work, charity sites that merely want a small presence, non ecommerce sites.
I could write and talk about this all day – it’s something I have analysed and practiced in great detail, made mistakes, wished I’d done some as child portals and others I think should have been on their own, but still feel that for me, reselling dnn, variety of clients, most being small / mid enterprises, variations of budgets, will and am pushing to have more child portals in place. It makes sense because on the down side, we have had to build out infrastructure to help us handle the many sites we have, why some are upgraded, others aren’t, some can’t be, some should be, but client doesn’t want to pay so we may take an approach that for our business requirements, we’ll upgrade some regardless.
The sites on child portals to me are well looked after – the investement in hosting them from clients gives us the ability to assign more resources to them, and sometimes out biggest decision is which portal instance we’re going to put them on – we have different flavours, different styles and different ‘genres’ I guess.
Don’t be greedy – I think someone wanting to run 10,000 childs of one instance has bigger you know what’s than me.. I would never be so greedy to think I could build some mega empire without at least disclosing to these people that they are by choice running with the masses.
Dont’ use sites that have heavy registration or incredible amounts of traffic on child portals.
It really is something people should embrace for the right reasons and not think they have to have one master portal, but a series of instances that helps them make some good business decisions and with the right DNS setup, you can impress your client immensely.
I have a new client who is a reseller – actually a direct competitor of mine, if you stand us in a room together and over 6 months, I”ve helped him completely transform how he does business by taking him away from his ‘dedicated server with a handful of knowledge’ into a very slick shared hosting arrangement, quite unique in it’s structure, and introduced him to custom built dnn’s, child portals and better understanding of what modules to use. He has brought across a significant number of clients – over 40 fully hosted customers of his, and I have learnt so much how resellers need specific support and we share alot of information that has seem him forge ahead with new ideas, more sleep at night and an understanding that with experience, DNN is a formidable product.
I really hope 2009 is a good year for me – it’s been shaping up to be that – but OH MY it’s not been without pain and mistakes – some I really feel was caused by using DNN, and others although using DNN were due to not trusting my own judgement and experimenting with clients (which we simply don’t do now – KISS wins every time) I might even get to draw a wage this year.. yay.. . (Ok that was a bit of personal self indulgence here – but honestly it’s been a hard apprenticeship)
The reason I’ve taken the time to share a little about what I am doing is that I genuinely believe, from years of practice, from upgrading DNN 3 > 4 child portals and wondering if that was going to be 5 hours of my life I’ll never get back, through to now having some very nice slick builds/types of DNN we feel comfortable with and if I can impress on those wondering about if it’s worth it or not – and they feel comfortable that they can do it, then it’s worth them to spend some time looking at their customer base and how they can offer some better handled solutions, by consolidating and having child portals that meet their needs and their clients needs.
I might if I find the time do a small podcast or talk about child portals if anyone is interested and just talk about where I have found them a lifesaver and why this is one of the key areas of DNN that I find is such a winner that is so under used and not really promoted as one of the ‘star’ points of it’s solution.
Cheers
Nina Meiers
Thank you so much for your comments. It’s good to see people who are very passionate about such topics as this.
Nice post Nina. I’m curious to know what kind of server specs are required to host those 220 DB’s and 300 sites? Are those all running on 1 server box?
One question we constantly ask ourselves, is how to organize the ASP.NET Application Pools across our various DNN installs. We have 3 or 4 different "shared" DNN installs that we use to create child/parent portals. We also have a dozen or so clients that have their own separate DNN installs. This is all on the same physical server. What strategy have you adopted for AppPools? Do you create 1 AppPool per DNN install?
@ Michael – Thanks for the comment – I’m allocating more time to be able to discuss things in more detail so others get a better understanding.
@ Kevin – Ok – At the moment we have two machines, one HP running sql2000 & web combined and another my older Dell box running just sql 2005. We have 12gb of ram on the HP box, but I think the HP box has been more reliable overall and robust perhaps is a better word than the dell. We are shortly going to deploy a new SQL box on a Sun server with SAS drives, as the Dell has SATA and I think that was a bit of a mistake – and the hard drive array is not optimised as I would like, based on my experience now with server hard drive configuration, backups and traffic in general.
Until mid last year – I had 120 DBS and about 180 DNN sites on the HP Proliant box and it was doing fine – except I felt we were peaking and needed to add more ram and the time had come to split them up.
Ideally I would have liked to have started with two machines but not all goes to plan.
I have many separate application pools and we have modified the default pool settings to suit the performance of the machine, although at times we need to go in and modify some of the key ones again from time to time. It’s ongoing I guess, massaging and tweaking to make sure they run.
I don’t run that many standard DNN default builds – the majority of my DNN sites now are in fact precompiled and modified to reduce thousand of what we feel are ‘uneccessary’ hits to the db, particularly when logged in as administrator. I guess from my perspective, the ‘bloat’ has been written out, and there are shared components, less dlls, the builds are released already optimised.
Also – the only host access to these accounts are restricted to a small handful, including my resellers and developers only – who understand and respect this is not a ‘developer machine’. I know EXACTLY what modules are running on the server, and we have a list of modules that I REFUSE to install – I don’t care how high profile they may be, their products are detrimental to the performance of my sites and machines and therefore not allowed.
By running a compiled version the requests to the database are so significantly reduced, so I can put more onto one machine.
Even if I was doing DNN installs, we’d only be putting in the bare minimum. This enormous and ridiculous amount of modules installed make DNN fat and slow in my opinion.
Each ecommerce build has it’s own application pool.
Each site that has alot of traffic or multiple editors, has it’s own application pool.
We do use shared pools, but when we get over 30 sites in there it’s just not happening as I’d like – too many recycles, threshold is met too many times.
We do have timed recycling as well – but that requires a degree of ‘tweaking’ as we’ve found sometimes it’s not been as easy to apply as we would like.
But nothing beats feeding the machine ram.
I hope within the next two months to have remove all the sql2000 instances off the box and we’ll remove sql altogether – however, I do have a couple that won’t upgrade to 2005 and that has eaten alot of my time working out a strategy of – should I upgrade to tell them to move..
Hope this gives you some insight -
Nina Meiers
@Nina Thanks so much for the great information and quick response. It’s nice to know there are others out there that think about the best strategies for hosting DNN and are willing to share with the community.
Your comments about a customized build of DNN are interesting, as I’ve often thought about doing something similar. I once ran the SQL Profiler on a standard DNN install out-of-the-box and was shocked to see the number of database hits that were being generated!
We have about 40 databases and 80 sites running on a single Dell machine with 4 GB RAM that handles IIS/ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. So far it has been reliable but we’re definitely starting to feel the "pinch" and I’m thinking it’s time for a new box.
Keep up the great work! I’d love to see more posts like this in the future