As a relative newbie I'm still trying to get my head round a few things and have a few questions. From a top level perspective the process for getting a website live could be as follows
Install and setup Umbraco on local development machine
Design pages/doc types/templates etc
Setup Umbraco on Live server
Copy website to live server and give access to client.
Let the client populate the site with content/pages etc
My questions are...
I have a dedicated server with exisisting sites on it all using host headers, can i install Umbraco on the default website without breaking any of my existing sites
Why bother working locally if in the end I'm going to have to transfer all the content to live, can i just work on the live server?
With my 1 live umbraco installtion can I run multiple websites for different clients or should i install a seperate install for each client. ie clients login and access their own cms...
Apologies if the above questions sound very basic but i'm trying to get things setup in the right way...
1) Why would you want to install the Umbraco site on the Default Website as opposed to setting up a separate website in IIS, preferrably with its own Application Pool? Of course, if the Default Website is not serving any content at the moment you can use it to install Umbraco, and it shouldn't interfere with other websites in IIS.
2) If you're not planning on creating any custom packages, or extending Umbraco in any way (which probably needs some debugging) you could decide to work directly on the live server.
3) It is possible to configure multiple sites for different clients in one Umbraco installation, but I'd strongly advise against it. You'd need some kind of naming convention to distinguish between the document types, templates and macros for each site. But you're Umbraco installation will probably get cluttered in no time, and you'll go crazy. :)
Thanks for the reply, I was always of the understanding that when you install Ubmraco it had to be installed on the default website, was that only for older versions of Umbraco or indeed older versions of IIS?
I'm already crazy enough so I'll steer clear of multiple sites on 1 install, can i assume then that its fine to install umbraco each time for a new client on the same live server? If so what is the max that is allowed or indeed that a server can handle?
I guess i could create a subdomain for each client (cms.clienturl.com) for each installation of Umbraco?
Yes, I'd advise you to set up a separate Umbraco configuration for each website.
The amount of Umbraco installations a single server can handle mainly depends on the amount of traffic the websites generate, and on available memory, CPU, database, and harddisk space (in that order). We're currently using a dedicated Single Quad Core x3430 with4GB and regular SATA disks and with the current server load we should be able to deal with 20 installations, without doing any tweaking. The bottle neck would be the 4GB memory, so by upgrading to 8GB we could probably serve 50 installations. Again, this is just a simple calculation. No hard statistics to back it up.
You don't need to set up a subdomain for each client. Clients can just browse to http://www.clienturl.com/umbraco/ to log in to the CMS.
development process
As a relative newbie I'm still trying to get my head round a few things and have a few questions. From a top level perspective the process for getting a website live could be as follows
My questions are...
Apologies if the above questions sound very basic but i'm trying to get things setup in the right way...
1) Why would you want to install the Umbraco site on the Default Website as opposed to setting up a separate website in IIS, preferrably with its own Application Pool? Of course, if the Default Website is not serving any content at the moment you can use it to install Umbraco, and it shouldn't interfere with other websites in IIS.
2) If you're not planning on creating any custom packages, or extending Umbraco in any way (which probably needs some debugging) you could decide to work directly on the live server.
3) It is possible to configure multiple sites for different clients in one Umbraco installation, but I'd strongly advise against it. You'd need some kind of naming convention to distinguish between the document types, templates and macros for each site. But you're Umbraco installation will probably get cluttered in no time, and you'll go crazy. :)
Thanks for the reply, I was always of the understanding that when you install Ubmraco it had to be installed on the default website, was that only for older versions of Umbraco or indeed older versions of IIS?
I'm already crazy enough so I'll steer clear of multiple sites on 1 install, can i assume then that its fine to install umbraco each time for a new client on the same live server? If so what is the max that is allowed or indeed that a server can handle?
I guess i could create a subdomain for each client (cms.clienturl.com) for each installation of Umbraco?
Thanks again.
Yes, I'd advise you to set up a separate Umbraco configuration for each website.
The amount of Umbraco installations a single server can handle mainly depends on the amount of traffic the websites generate, and on available memory, CPU, database, and harddisk space (in that order). We're currently using a dedicated Single Quad Core x3430 with 4GB and regular SATA disks and with the current server load we should be able to deal with 20 installations, without doing any tweaking. The bottle neck would be the 4GB memory, so by upgrading to 8GB we could probably serve 50 installations. Again, this is just a simple calculation. No hard statistics to back it up.
You don't need to set up a subdomain for each client. Clients can just browse to http://www.clienturl.com/umbraco/ to log in to the CMS.
Thanks Arjan, appreciate your input.
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