I'm working on a project that I would like to make available as a subscription service. I've worked in other frameworks and have asked this question but I thought I would see what would be a good route for doing this in ZF.
My question is: What would be the best design for hosting, scalability, and reducing development overhead for a web application? Would it be better to have 1.) a single installed instance per customer each with its own separate db/files OR 2.) design the application so that the whole application works under one installation with each customer having a username, password, and some type of organization ID to limit access to just their data? The second solution would need some way to extend Auth to provide checking the organization ID (possible?). I'd be interested in hearing the different opinions on which would be better. It seems to me like my overhead would be less just to manage one big application but upfront design would be more complex. To go the other route would make it easier to design but I would have to manage each installation separately which would be a lot of work. The ability to grab a copy of just one customer's database seems like it would be nice though. Other projects like Wordpress-mu have argued that one big single app is the way to go as it is more scalable but others have argued that it's easier working with many installations. Thanks in advance for any feedback and I apologize if this was asked somewhere else on this list. I couldn't find anything easily. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Design-Question-tp21644511p21644511.html Sent from the Zend Framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
