> One option for a hosting company is to run their own core Drupal system,
> with each customer being able to edit the contents of a subdirectory in the
> sites/ directory. That way they can keep control over much of the behaviour,
> keep it patched, remove CPU-hungry bits at their own discretion etc. I've
> not heard of anyone doing this yet, though.
In fact this is the basic technology behind Bryght's open source hostmaster platform, and we've done this a lot for different customers.
However, it's not a performance benefit, it's a maintainability benefit (in theory). You don't get less of a footprint in Apache because you share the underlying files.
For shared hosts, there's no real benefit for them as they're not doing large enough scale systems to bother, plus most of them don't touch code (and wouldn't know Drupal from wordpress without grepping for it).
Best,
JL
On 7/10/07, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb@2bits.com> wrote:
On 7/10/07, Lennart Borgman (gmail) <
lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
J-P Stacey wrote:
> One option for a hosting company is to run their own core Drupal system,
> with each customer being able to edit the contents of a subdirectory in
> the sites/ directory. That way they can keep control over much of the
> behaviour, keep it patched, remove CPU-hungry bits at their own
> discretion etc. I've not heard of anyone doing this yet, though.
Thanks J-P.
I have always wondered why an installation like that is not the standard
for shared web hosts. A problem is perhaps incompatibilities at when
upgrading, but that could be solved by having the customer specific part
pointing to a special location. When the web host upgrades Drupal (and
other similar software) they could just do a fresh install in a new
location.
At the web host I am currently using they do not handle Drupal,
WordPress etc that way (which surprised me a lot when I first saw it).
Does Drupal have builtin support for this installation structure?
Specialized hosts (e.g. Bryght) does that already (have their own repository
and sanctioned modules.
However, most shared web hosts are small operations, or simply not into
maintaining code of any kind. They are motel operators, not caterers, builders,
or engineers. If they do this for Drupal, they have to do it for 100 other things
their customers ask for.
This is why there are things like Fantastico, which provides this feature for web
hosts, and they subscribe to it and give it to their customers as a feature.
So, don't expect any shared host to do this any time soon.
--
Jonathan Lambert
Principal & CEO
Email: j@workhabit.com
Phone: 415-376-7274
WorkHabit, Inc. (Formerly FireBright, Inc.)
http://www.workhabit.com/
http://www.workhabit.org/