Multiple Domains - New Question

This may be a dumb question, but I have six clients, all different sites/domain names/hosting, blah blah blah. I'm very impressed with Dreamhost and would like to move them all over. In order to keep them all separate should I sign up for six different hosting plans or is this more of a job for a Virtual Server Plan like you guys offer (your partner)? BTW, each site has very little traffic.

No you can use only one plan.
Just Create 6 different users to separate all data.
You can do that on panel after.

You don't actually have to create different users for each site. It all depends on whether you think you'll have different people do system administration on each site.

How is the content for the different sites managed? Do you do everything or do your clients do any content updates?

One last question - are any of these sites heavy enough usage to cause shared hosting troubles? (busy forums or somesuch?)

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First off, thank you so much for such quick responses! (refreshing). I will be doing 90% of the website maintenance. I do have a couple pages (that I will password protect) that my clients can update (simply .txt files for dynamic news updates, etc.).

Also, the traffic will not be a problem. No forums on any of them of any kind. Very small, local businesses and personal sites.

Again, so I'm clear - I can have one plan (the Monster Code, for instance) to host up to 6 completely different sites with different domain names? (sorry to be so naive - it's all kind of new to me)

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Again, so I'm clear - I can have one plan (the Monster Code, for instance) to host up to 6 completely different sites with different domain names? (sorry to be so naive - it's all kind of new to me)

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Yep. You could have 60 of them! You could have 600 of them!

Remember that you still have to register/renew the domains. If they're .com, .net, .org, or .info domains, you can transfer them to DreamHost. All hosting plans come with one free lifetime domain registration. You can use this to register a new domain or renew an existing one. Each year, you'll be given one credit which you can use to renew the domain or register a different one.

There are also promo codes that you can use to get additional free lifetime domain registrations.

Also note that you can also host unlimited subdomains. (and you can create as many subdomains as you want!)

DreamHost allows unlimited domain names on their plans. You are only required to pay a domain registration fee of $9.95/Year for each domain you add as only the first domain is included in the plan. Alternatively, you can change the nameserver of your exsisting domains (which will be free) or use one of the promo codes which offer free domain registrations.

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Another consideration when supplying hosting for clients, if they will be able to upload their own files/ edit sites etc, just remember if one of them does something that violates copyright, and Dreamhost receives a complaint about it, they will shut the entire account down, no questions asked. You will then have 5 innocent casualties you will need to answer too.

Sometimes separation of accounts is a good thing.

Completely understand - that's fair. I greatly appreciate the information. Thanks again for the quick responses and thorough explanations. I'm signing up.

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One last question - are any of these sites heavy enough usage to cause shared hosting troubles? (busy forums or somesuch?)

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This is interesting. Is forum app is the most trouble to shared environment ? I plan to have one launch end of this month :)

Dino

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This is interesting. Is forum app is the most trouble to shared environment ? I plan to have one launch end of this month :)

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Of the webapps commonly deployed - blogs, forums, and heavier CMS'es, forums generally have a heavier resource usage pattern and are harder to scale. I think this is because they are user-contribution intensive and that simply viewing threads can require a lot of database queries. Caching is also much less effective or more seldomly deployed.

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Caching is also much less effective or more seldomly deployed.

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Hm... do you have any recommendation for lightweight forum ? I think wwwthreads which is used by DH is a good one ? But I already deploy MyBB which is mentioned in one of DH's forum thread.


Dino

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do you have any recommendation for lightweight forum

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Well, I don't actually think most forums end up being active enough to warrant performance optimization being your first criterion for selection. I still recommend keeping usability and anti-spam features as your primary discriminants.

But if you do want to think about performance, as I hear it, any analysis should include three dimensions:
1. Read performance - driven by how many pageviews your forum is getting
2. Write performance - driven by how many new posts you are getting
3. Search performance - driven by how many searches you allow

You need to decide whether you need a dynamic forum or a static forum. In a dynamic forum, each view is generated by querying the database of posts (modulo caching). In a static forum, each post regenerates static pages representing threads.

Search is one of the most database intensive features of a forum. Most forums have at least some forum of search-limiting features to prevent the forum database from grinding to a halt. Google search does take the load off of the database but is limited to pages indexed by Google.

Which brings up another topic: making sure the search engine crawlers don't bring your forum to a grinding halt.

Anyway, I don't intend this reply to be comprehensive, but just wanted to start you thinking about the issues.

In practice, I would just go with one of the standard forums and tweak from there. Caching and database optimization goes a long way as evidenced by the this listing of large furums.

BTW, I'm currently enamored of SMF among the free forums. My first love was vBulletin, though.

If you want to continue this discussion, we should probably move it to a separate topic rather than digressing this one any further.