Hosting multiple internet facing sites on a single server

Question

Is it possible to have multiple internet facing SharePoint sites running from the same server? I.E., different domains, completely unrelated content.

Bonus question: If this is possible, and I have multiple internet facing sites on the same SharePoint install, is it possible for them to have a limited amount of content shared? What I'm asking is can you very tightly control what's shared between them, or would it be better to keep them as independent silos?

Answer 1

Separate web applications would get you totally separated sites on the same server.

I don't believe there would be a method to share content easily between the web applications. I don't know enough about content migration/deployment to know if that would be viable. An klunky alternative would be to have another separate "shared" web application where any and all shared content resides and using RSS web parts or page viewer web parts, the content is exposed in the other web applications.

Answer 2

Yes it is possible. I think you can find valuable info here:

• Plan for host-named site collections

Sharing content can also be done but it is not something you receive OOTB. I guess that search can be used for this type of scenario.

Answer 3

Yes, you can create different web applications.

I dont know if you can share information between application but you can use the content deployment feature from sharepoint to create overnight jobs that copy the information from one web application to the other, its a widely used practice for companies that want to check the content before going live.

Answer 4

Yes you could go down creating a separate web application for each site, however this is not the advised route as SharePoint does not scale well through additional web applications. The recommended approach is to use host header site collections within one or more web applications, an approach referred to as Multi-Tenancy.

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http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010mt1.aspx