I am considering starting my own DNN-based business, in a niche market that is quite large, and that doesn't currently have anyone offering anything like the product I will be offering. With a lot of luck, I could end up with quite a large number of DNN sites to manage, possibly in the hundreds or even thousands (I can dream!), and I'm concerned about the feasibility of that. My first thought was that I would have fewer sites, and use portals extensively, but if I do that, I worry about capacity planning (i.e. I set up 15 child portals on one installation, then some of the portals get such heavy use that performance starts to be affected, and as far as I know, there isn't a way to break off individual portals to a new site). So now I'm wondering if I need to do separate installations for each client, but then maintaining and upgrading the sites becomes a nightmare, along with the fact that my licensing costs would go up for the 3rd party modules I am using.

Also, my preferred way of accessing the portals would be through 'http://www.clientsname.mydomainname.com', even though the portals wouldn't all be hosted out of the same DNN instance, and would in fact frequently be on different servers all together. Is that possible?

Any input at all would be welcome!

Thanks for the reply, Mitchell.

Unfortunately, I don't have any usage estimates for these sites yet. That is one thing I am trying to figure out now, although I'm really not sure how to go about it. In the work I currently do, dealing with server capacity is supposed to be another group's job, and they don't even seem to care.   So I'm trying to educate myself on this part of website management, both for my side business and my day job.

My main worry is the database as the weak-link in the speed chain. In a DNN web farm environment, is the database distributed, also?