Many sites in a WebRole : limits?

Question

I know that we can have one WebRole for many sites using "Sites" section.
I'd like to know the limit of this : In which cases is it better to create a new WebRole ?

Answer 1

The documentation claims that you have "full IIS" - so the limits will be quite high - I've seen inside one shared hosting setup with well over a hundred sites running on the same IIS box.

At a practical level, the limits will depend on:

• how busy your individual sites are - how many resources each one requires in terms of network bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and disk space.
• how hard it's going to be to administer all your sites as one entity - it can be quite hard to synchronise the upgrade of multiple sites at a development team level, and it can generate additional testing (are you sure that upgrading site B hasn't changed sites A and C?)
• whether you want all your sites to scale together horizontally or whether you want to scale them independently.