In my opinion you are right on track.

My personal recommendation is to group like sites on DNN instllations if posible IF the following conditions are met.

1.) You will NOT need to break the sites apart at a later time
2.) An outage on one site will affect others (you must be ok with this).
3.) You will not need the same username to be used by different people on each site.

GIven your listed setup I would use two DNN installations, each with a separate database to keep like sites hosted together.  As you mentioned you will most likely have different custom module needs between the two segments and it makes a good logical separation.

Regarding folder placement you can physically place the DNN files wherever you want.  You will be creating a new Website for each URL and you can simply point the home directory for that website to the proper DNN folder.

NOTE: when configuring each of your URL's you will need 1 IIS website each and will need to specify the host header values for each domain!

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-Mitchel Sellers
Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, DNN MVP
CEO/Director of Development - IowaComputerGurus Inc.


Visit mitchelsellers.com for my mostly DNN Blog and support forum.

Visit IowaComputerGurus.com for free DNN Modules, DNN Performance Tips, DNN Consulting Quotes, and DNN Technical Support Services

Jeff and Mitch,

Thank you for the EXCELLENT input. To further clarify, the goal is by 2010, we would have 5-10 "stores" and 50-75 "info" sites. Right now we have a single dedicated box. My guess is that would be 2 iis boxes and one SQL box by the end of 2009.

One other point - the "store" sites are legally owned by corporation #1, the "info" sites are owned by another corporation #2. Corporation #1 has the legal relationship to the hosting provider. Corporation #1 then bills corporation #2 for use of the hardware. The point of this is that it is probable that corporation #2 will want / need to move its implementation to its own platform by 2010. We do not want to rebuild all of this in 24 months.

So with this additional information, would the following make sense from theory and technical practicality:

1) Install DNN to c:\data\apps\dotnetnuke\shop and c:\data\apps\dotnetnuke\info. The c:\data represents stuff we put on the box not what the hosting provider setup. With this all of the "shop" sites will use the dnn install from c:\data\apps\dotnetnuke\shop.

2) Create DNN databases as dotnetnukeshop and dotnetnukeinfo. The login name and usernames would be dotnetnukeadmin, dotnetnukeinfo and dotnetnukeshop. The admin would be for installation and the dotnetnukeinfo / shop would be for the lower security setting described in Shawns recent "little know security feature" post.

3)  Physical location for the IIS sites: Is it generally accepted to put the physical location home directory of the IIS sites to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\myDog, myCat, etc or should I create a folder under c:\data\sites\myDog, myCat. My preference is c:\data\sites as everything I have done is under c:\data.

4) Virtual directory: This is still puzzling me a bit. For each site I define in IIS, do I simply create a virtual directory pointing to its respective c:\data\apps\dotnetnuke\shop or c:\data\apps\dotnetnuke\info folder? If so, how do I set the "Home Directory" do I do not use myDog/dotnetnuke?

Thank you so much for lending your expertise!

PS: Mitch: I was born in Iowa. Much of my family lives in Washington, IA.