Hi all,

We are currently setting up a project for a new client where they will require 5 differently branded websites that share some products across each of the individual sites. Each of the sites will require up to 5 additional languages as well as the default language which is English. Each site will have a separate domain from which it can be accessed.

It is my understanding that it is fairly easy in Umbraco to create multi-language sites using the culture and hostnames option in Umbraco however, is it feasible to use a single installation for the purposes I describe above and what is the best way to approach this?

I can imagine that a structure such as the following would work:

>   Website 1
>     |
>     |-- English
>         |
>         |-- English pages here
>     |
>     |-- French
>         |
>         |-- French pages here
>     |

    Website 2
>     |-- English
>         |
>         |-- English pages here
>     |
>     |-- French
>         |
>         |-- French pages here

However, this would mean duplication of content as the common products / packages across each of the sites would have to be created multiple times.

Another factor is that most of the content / products will be updated by a nightly web service call to an external database that will fetch the information and loop through each new piece of content, creating it and applying relevant images to the products. This is easy enough with a single site or maybe even a single site with multiple languages but again, is it feasible to create this sort of setup in a single installation or should each site ideally be setup in its own umbraco installation.

I am currently weighing towards the latter (multiple Umbraco installations) and I have told this to our client but they would like reasoning for why we believe it should be this way. So far I have come up with the following:

-- A single installation would mean repetition of content across each of the domains. Whilst this would be the case with a separate installation, it would be in a separate database taking up less space.

-- Responsiveness :- On previous Umbraco sites I have worked on I have noticed that when the number of pages exceeds 1000 the Umbraco back end tends to slow down substantially. Having multiple sites and multiple languages on one installation will only make this worse

-- Update process :- Currently the update process on our other sites is able to focus on a fixed point e.g. the homepage. In this scenario there are multiple homepages so some additional work would be required to identify which homepage and which language the product update applies to in order for it to work correctly.

If anyone has attempted this before or has any feedback with regards to approaching this, it would be greatly appreciated as to me so far working with multiple installation seems quicker, easier and less hassle overall but I may be missing something.