How much time does it take to manage sites within a multisite architecture as compared to multiple single installs? [closed]

Question

A service my company offers is similar to managed hosting where we help keep a server, Drupal, related modules, and backups up to date on behalf of clients who can't or don't want to do that in house, and typically this averages out to be about 30 to 90 min of work per site per month.

A client has asked me to manage their entire portfolio of 70 Drupal sites, all of which are part of a multisite architecture with site files on one server and DB on another.

I can't imagine that this is 70 hours of work, but I'm not familiar enough with multisite installs of this size to understand fully what this would entail.

To ensure that I estimate time correctly, what would I need to take into consideration when comparing management solutions for single server / single site installations as compared to the same number of sites in a multisite installation?

Answer 1

Short: It really depends.

Long: Each individual multisite installation adds complexity to the whole. If these 70 sites are more ore less the same in terms of individual content but (nearly) same codebase, modules and similar themes (imagine a large organization spread over the world with region specific characteristics), you'll most likely need less time to maintain.

If these are 70 profoundly individual sites, you'll probably end up checking dependencies over dependencies for modules and themes, debugging deadlocks and incompatabilities. Maintaining this can be a real challenge and 70 hours a month are gone faster than you have "drushed and rollbacked" everything to working.

Accurate documentation and a SLA designed fair for both parties should be the key to a successful maintenance.

(I maintain a multisite installation with around 30 instances for a large organization with all the pros described above.)

Answer 2

Maybe you should include Aegir in management. Aegir, along with Drush, can help you a lot to automate some tasks, from backups, verification, enabling / disabling SSL, adding new or removing existing platforms and their multisites.

Answer 3

I can say that you should take into consideration that managing multisite drupal installation usually takes less time then handling same amount of single installations. I will briefly explain how it can be done for drupal 7

1) when you download drupal you can find sites folder in root;

2) You can add as many websites as needed inside sites folder, just create for example "example" folder;

3) In example folder create settings.php file

$databases['default']['default'] = array (
  'database' => 'example',
  'username' => 'admin',
  'password' => 'admin123,
  'host' => 'db_host_address',
  'driver' => 'mysql',
);

4) create modules, themes, libraries folder for site specific modules, themes and libraries in sites/example folder. All common (used by more then one site or features which potentially can be used in future by multiple sites) modules, themes, libraries can be added into corresponding folders inside sites/all directory.

5) To establish http connection with example website you should create server alias then add sites.php file inside sites folder.

$sites['localhost.example'] = 'example';

where localhost.example is your server alias and example is your site folder.

you should take into account that in future it will be easier to update drupal core and contributed modules but as cons you should take into account that during each common change all websites which use changed module, theme should be tested well. In case of updating core all sites should go through round of testing.

From my personal experience multisite installation is easier to maintain. I wish you good look with your task!