Thread

I’m working on a site project right now that involves converting 114 individual sites to one ExpressionEngine install, and will eventually encompass 5-600 individual sites.  I’d like to know if the client can purchase volume MSM licenses at a discounted rate.  It would be great if we could purchase 50 or 100 licenses at a time for much less than retail; is there anything we can work out with you for this?

Your best bet would be to contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) directly.

Okay, thanks.

Note that ExpressionEngine almost supports multiple sites without the MSM option, as long as you don’t use all its features. I’m currently hosting over fifty semi-independent sites/folders on EE without the MSM module.

The main reason to use MSM is for multi-site member administration, i.e. where you have registered users that login.

Perhaps for some sites, Magnus, but not all.  If prompted to come up with the “main reason” we are using MSM on the EllisLab family of sites, for instance, it would be because we do not want cross-content unless explicitly desired; we want completely separate template groups and weblogs, and the freedom to have the URI structure for each site independent of the other sites.  And we have content authors and staff members that need differing amounts of access per site.  Those straightforward desires are not possible without a comprehensive solution such as MSM.

I’m pretty sure you didn’t design MSM with the goal to host 600+ sites on the same EE installation. Before paying a LOT of money for a solution that wasn’t designed for him, it’s fair that he’s told the whole truth.

My fifty sites/folders all have separate template groups, weblogs and URI structures. There is no cross-content. I still believe that it is mainly on the member administration level - including different amounts of member access per site - that MSM shines.

Like Victor G, I also worry that it may not gracefully handle 600+ sites running off the same EE server.

Well I’m assuming that a client that owns 600 properties will secure appropriate hosting, so whether it’s one or 600 installations is rather immaterial.  And it’s rather presumptuous of you to say that the MSM solution “was not designed for him” especially considering that to the best of my knowledge you do not have any personal experience using MSM.  Arden has not provided enough details about the sites to allow any of us, myself included, to determine if it’s his best option.  He’s worked with ExpressionEngine long enough, though, that I wager he has weighed the options and knows what he’s doing.

And I do not wish to derail Arden’s topic with a discussion of your fifty sites, but yours is a rather different situation.  Your “sites” do not have independent weblogs and templates.  There are clever ways to make it seem that they are, through wise use of URL segments and such, but the layer of separation is a facade (capable though it may be), and the facade doesn’t extend to site preferences.  Take EE and CI as an example, though, and you’ll see that having actual unique template groups is a must.  They both have a ‘bug_tracker’ template group, but each has dramatically different needs.  To accomplish that without MSM would result in incredibly messy templates full of conditionals and situational tags that would be burdensome to create.  And I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be for a developer who was not involved in the creation of a site to suddenly inherit it, which happens often with many design and development firms that use ExpressionEngine.  I’m tragically off topic now, and I apologize.  If you wish to continue a discussion of the difference between running multiple sites with and without MSM, please start a new thread in the General discussion forum.

This is true, EE and MSM are certainly not designed or intended to run 600 sites off a single installation. While you might do such a thing and stay within the license, that’s way beyond what’s intended with the software. Of course, people always abuse EE (and here I don’t mean abuse in a bad way) and see just how far it can go.

Which brings up the main reason to use MSM, especially if those 600 sites are commercial in nature. If you are intending to abuse EE so handily, you’re going to want technical support which you only get with MSM. Because there is no way we’re going to give technical support to 600 sites off a single install for $250. Abuse the software, not the people who make it 😊