Hey Lee / Joe here's a few questions on setup considerations.

1) When setting up a client portal that will be doing "moderate" store front selling, is it better to go as a parent portal or set up it's own instance?
   A) How many Parent / Child portals before we see performance issues?
   B) Will it affect how purchasing is done through different portals on the same instance?

2) If I set up a site as a parent portal than I want to port over to it's own instance, what are the + and -
    A) any considerations before I even attempt this?

3) Any limitations to how many parent portals or instances on a server before it drags? 

4) Does loading too many modules cause any performance issues?  


Thanks

Peter
U1.net

Parent and child portals really are the same thing ... at least internally to DotNetNuke. One doesn't affect performance any more than another.

If you have purchasing on multiple portals, they do not have to be linked. Each portal can handle its purchasing requirements separately from the others.

If you think that you might want to separate a portal from an installation at some future time, it might make sense to start off with a separate installation.

Performance is probably affected more by the total traffic to all of the sites, not by the number of portals.

It's probably a good idea NOT to load up your installation with modules that aren't being used. Occasionally they will require cycles to be compiled. You can minimize this by using a "keep alive" service to keep your DotNetNuke service active.

Great, on the purchasing on multiple portals question, It's still the same database correct? And if so, than future separation is definitely more difficult.

Peter

Yes.  All portals within a single installation of DotNetNuke make use of a single database.

I think that "best practices" call for separate installations for separate websites, unless there are other compelling reasons.

Ok, 1 last question on this any limitation how many instances on a server? Or as long as a stay on top of memory and hd space I'm ok? Running Full SQL 2005

Peter

No, no other problems that I can think of.