We looking into using Umbraco to support 1 high traffic and 3 low traffic websites with about 7-10 content editors and 3 developers and I'm wonder what is the best hosting infratructure to use.
Should we look to split our the Admin and hosted websites onto different boxes etc.? can we support Multiple sites in Umbraco?
We've never used Umbraco and have little experience of it so any help would be appreciated.
Welcome to the forum - it's a bit of a leading question buddy you can set umbraco up in a number of different ways (it is really a .net based app and as such allows web farms, clustering, caching and all sorts of other wonderful gubbins) and really as you haven't defined what you class as high traffic and low traffic and also have not provided spec of machines you intend to run it on it's pretty hard to give you a definitive answer. It's also pretty dependent on what you intend to do with the site (just serve up content or have some wonderful dynamic content pages that hogs cpu??)
I'll try to answer what I can:
Should we look to split our the Admin and hosted websites onto different boxes etc.? I'm presuming here by Admin you mean the content areas of the site......You could split them but again it really depends on what hardware you have and if you really need to do this. The simplest solution is to have all your eggs in one basket but this might not be how you want to run it you may believe that this could be a security risk, as i say without knowing more about your infrastructure and what you are trying to do it's pretty hard to tell. My view here would be to have a crack at setting up a test environment and run some performance benchmarking against it and see how you get on - I'd go with version 4.7.2 at the moment as version 5 is a little raw at the moment from the couple of weeks i've spent trying to setup some websites.
can we support Multiple sites in Umbraco? Yes this is easy enough to setup using hostnames in Umbraco and host headers in IIS..
in terms of traffic our high traffic site get's around 20k visitors a week and is essentially a brochure site that will just serve up content with some dynamic gallerys. The lower traffic sites consist of an intra and extranet currently running on SharePoint with a few hundred hits a day and a B2B site with only 60 customers.
We're contemplating using Rackspace Cloud servers but again, we're unsure as to what spec will suffice for hosting the Umbraco CMS, how many sites you can support under one instance etc., how you publish content. For instance should we look at 5 boxes, one for each site, one for Umbraco CMS and a DB or is that overkill. Do we actually just need 2 high spec boxes, one for all sites and Umbraco CMS and one for DB?
We're really are right at the very start with Umbraco but it's proving hard to find the answers to these questions.
Interestingly, why do you recommend 4.7.2? We've been advised to adopt 5, latest, MVC3, better engine yada yad yada
Neither the high traffic site or the lower traffic sites would in my opinion cause an issue - 20,000 visitors in a week is in my opinion not really that high. If we say you get 4000 hits a day and a day has (24*60*60) = 86400 seconds then that is a request every 86400 / 4000 = 21.6 seconds. IIS on a quad core machine with a decent amount of RAM would easily cope (most current dedicated servers would suffice) even if they were running umbraco and the SQL server DB behind.
However and this is the issue - I have no idea what your dynamic parts are doing - if they take 30 seconds each request and while processing they lock a thread on the cpu then IIS obviously won't have as much CPU left to serve other clients to the site. This is why I don't think you will get a totally straight answer to your question as it is dependent on what you are doing and the only way you will really be able to tell what your applications require and where they begin to have issue is by running benchmarking and performance tests against them.
My view would be to run the site on a single instance server with 4GB RAM and a couple of quad core CPU's - personally I don't think you'll have any issues. If you are on about running it in the cloud then surely you could start with way to much CPU and RAM for the first month leave some performance counters on and then review once you have some actual data back - downgrade the cloud system to save a bit of dough as you see fit.
I started using 5 to try to develop some client sites after enough piddling about with it (about a month) I realised it just isn't ready for a production system yet (this is in my opinion). It's just too buggy - I was constantly trying to look up niggly little issues + the lack of packages at the moment made me drop back to 4.7.1. I'm going to leave it for 6 months and then take another look and see where it is.
The dynamic element will be no more than a gallary generated from a db that contains basic content, title, short desc etc. with paths to images on a cdn. Nothing too taxing.
Your specs are pretty much on the money to what I was thinking so it's good to have that confirmed.
When would you suggest running a seperate site/umbraco setup for individual web sites? Some sites won't share any content, some will.
Also, how do we manage a typical dev/staging/live setup? I'm a little confised as to how you push changes through.
Interesting to read your comments on 5, there are a few threads on here highlighting issues with 5, particularly performance.
If you want to split the sites then you can easily do this if you know what you are doing with IIS and SQL server. You could have multiple SQL server DB's with multiple instances of umbraco running in different application pools in IIS. It's up to you really and depends on how seperate you really want to keep your sites - as you say if you want to share core controls or a core content framework then having a single instance is easy. Again it really depends what you want to accomplish. Keeping the sites seperate may make it easier to migrate a site if you find that there are issues.
I'm no guru on the dev/staging/live element it's still all a bit new to me as well but I believe umbraco offer a product called courier and that will basically do it for you.
Scalable Hosting Infrastructure
Hi,
We looking into using Umbraco to support 1 high traffic and 3 low traffic websites with about 7-10 content editors and 3 developers and I'm wonder what is the best hosting infratructure to use.
Should we look to split our the Admin and hosted websites onto different boxes etc.? can we support Multiple sites in Umbraco?
We've never used Umbraco and have little experience of it so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Hi Justin,
Welcome to the forum - it's a bit of a leading question buddy you can set umbraco up in a number of different ways (it is really a .net based app and as such allows web farms, clustering, caching and all sorts of other wonderful gubbins) and really as you haven't defined what you class as high traffic and low traffic and also have not provided spec of machines you intend to run it on it's pretty hard to give you a definitive answer. It's also pretty dependent on what you intend to do with the site (just serve up content or have some wonderful dynamic content pages that hogs cpu??)
I'll try to answer what I can:
Should we look to split our the Admin and hosted websites onto different boxes etc.?
I'm presuming here by Admin you mean the content areas of the site......You could split them but again it really depends on what hardware you have and if you really need to do this. The simplest solution is to have all your eggs in one basket but this might not be how you want to run it you may believe that this could be a security risk, as i say without knowing more about your infrastructure and what you are trying to do it's pretty hard to tell. My view here would be to have a crack at setting up a test environment and run some performance benchmarking against it and see how you get on - I'd go with version 4.7.2 at the moment as version 5 is a little raw at the moment from the couple of weeks i've spent trying to setup some websites.
can we support Multiple sites in Umbraco?
Yes this is easy enough to setup using hostnames in Umbraco and host headers in IIS..
I hope that helps.
Mark.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for helping, I'll try add some context.
in terms of traffic our high traffic site get's around 20k visitors a week and is essentially a brochure site that will just serve up content with some dynamic gallerys. The lower traffic sites consist of an intra and extranet currently running on SharePoint with a few hundred hits a day and a B2B site with only 60 customers.
We're contemplating using Rackspace Cloud servers but again, we're unsure as to what spec will suffice for hosting the Umbraco CMS, how many sites you can support under one instance etc., how you publish content. For instance should we look at 5 boxes, one for each site, one for Umbraco CMS and a DB or is that overkill. Do we actually just need 2 high spec boxes, one for all sites and Umbraco CMS and one for DB?
We're really are right at the very start with Umbraco but it's proving hard to find the answers to these questions.
Interestingly, why do you recommend 4.7.2? We've been advised to adopt 5, latest, MVC3, better engine yada yad yada
Hi Justin,
Neither the high traffic site or the lower traffic sites would in my opinion cause an issue - 20,000 visitors in a week is in my opinion not really that high. If we say you get 4000 hits a day and a day has (24*60*60) = 86400 seconds then that is a request every 86400 / 4000 = 21.6 seconds. IIS on a quad core machine with a decent amount of RAM would easily cope (most current dedicated servers would suffice) even if they were running umbraco and the SQL server DB behind.
However and this is the issue - I have no idea what your dynamic parts are doing - if they take 30 seconds each request and while processing they lock a thread on the cpu then IIS obviously won't have as much CPU left to serve other clients to the site. This is why I don't think you will get a totally straight answer to your question as it is dependent on what you are doing and the only way you will really be able to tell what your applications require and where they begin to have issue is by running benchmarking and performance tests against them.
My view would be to run the site on a single instance server with 4GB RAM and a couple of quad core CPU's - personally I don't think you'll have any issues. If you are on about running it in the cloud then surely you could start with way to much CPU and RAM for the first month leave some performance counters on and then review once you have some actual data back - downgrade the cloud system to save a bit of dough as you see fit.
I started using 5 to try to develop some client sites after enough piddling about with it (about a month) I realised it just isn't ready for a production system yet (this is in my opinion). It's just too buggy - I was constantly trying to look up niggly little issues + the lack of packages at the moment made me drop back to 4.7.1. I'm going to leave it for 6 months and then take another look and see where it is.
Mark.
The dynamic element will be no more than a gallary generated from a db that contains basic content, title, short desc etc. with paths to images on a cdn. Nothing too taxing.
Your specs are pretty much on the money to what I was thinking so it's good to have that confirmed.
When would you suggest running a seperate site/umbraco setup for individual web sites? Some sites won't share any content, some will.
Also, how do we manage a typical dev/staging/live setup? I'm a little confised as to how you push changes through.
Interesting to read your comments on 5, there are a few threads on here highlighting issues with 5, particularly performance.
Thanks again Mark, it really helps.
Hi Justin,
If you want to split the sites then you can easily do this if you know what you are doing with IIS and SQL server. You could have multiple SQL server DB's with multiple instances of umbraco running in different application pools in IIS. It's up to you really and depends on how seperate you really want to keep your sites - as you say if you want to share core controls or a core content framework then having a single instance is easy. Again it really depends what you want to accomplish. Keeping the sites seperate may make it easier to migrate a site if you find that there are issues.
I'm no guru on the dev/staging/live element it's still all a bit new to me as well but I believe umbraco offer a product called courier and that will basically do it for you.
Mark.
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