How many web app's

Question

I'm certainly a newby in SharePoint but my company give me the great task to deploy it.

It's a SharePoint 2013 standard installed onPremise. Our goal is to build some team sites plus personal sites.

My question is a call for best practice and community experience. I would want to focus about the number of web apps to be created.

My feeling give me :

• one for Central Administration console
• one for personal sites
• one for team sites - may be declined as people coming to use SP and sites number growing up
• one for centralSearch
• one for tests

Thanks for your advise

Answer 1

I think that is a solid setup. As for the test, I don't know if it's possible, but maybe have testing items on a different hardware system just to be safe! But that's only if it's available.

Here's something useful someone told me when I first started: each web application should ideally have its own application pool. That way, if the app pool fails, it won't take down all other web applications in that pool. The downside, though, is that each application pool has an overhead (let's say.... 10 MB). So for every app pool you create, you are essentially fencing off 10MB of space to allow the web application to work in. Even if it's not used completely, that 10MB cannot be touched by anything else, so take this into account depending on the sizes of the app pools, etc.

Edit: I only mention that last part to help you decide how many web applications you want.

Answer 2

What would the web app for test be useful for? Could you not use a specific site collection for that? If it is intended for testing different versions of custom solutions etc it will not help to make it a separate web application I'm afraid.

Having a separate web application for search is not necessary either, you just have to create a site collection using the search center template.

Best practice today is increasingly leaning towards using host-named site collections (HNSC). The reasons is said to be easier migrations, both onprem -> onprem and onprem -> online.

In that scenario you would use only two web applications, one for Central Admin and another for personal sites and team sites. Here is a very good Microsoft blog to get you familiar with this concept and how to work it: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/russmax/archive/2013/10/31/guide-to-sharepoint-2013-host-name-site-collections.aspx