How to stay busy for the next three years......

Well I know the answer, working in a place like my company ! And no I am not working for Microsoft.

I am going to run in the most crazy project I have ever done in my life.

I'm going to build something like 3000 to 4000 websites in the next three to five years !

No it's not a joke, it's a serious project, can't tell too much details for the moment, but it's really exciting.

Imagine my CV, how I am going to choose the one who represent the best for my career.

Of course, a lot of issues have to  be fixed before hand, like the hosting or the servers ! I suppose to be responsible for the hosting, because we are already hosting different projects, but there, I think I will contact Microsoft Datacenter for something like that.

The idea is that I am going to build a Template tool (guess on which platform ;-)), so the users will choose ther own look and feel from a series of predefined templates.
The big part will be surely the Database. I have already some search components I want to implement in the web sites, e.g a Resources Finder.

What puzzle me is how you can manage so many websites easily ! Maybe I should build my own Data ;-)





 

5 Comments

  • that'll be a great feat! that's about 2-3 websites per day... send accomplishment to the Guiness Book of World Records ;-)

  • Sure I will. But it's a serious stuff you know, and I wonder how to achieve the hosting ;-)

    For the code it should be ok if I build a sort of 'do your website by choosing a template' kind of tool.

  • We are doing something very similar for the automotive industry. One suggestion I will give you, is don't use HostHeaders... =)



    The management of them is insane.



    If the sites are of a templated nature, maybe you can do what we are doing, and build the architecture to support any number of sites, from one application directory.

  • Jeff how do you manage to solve the infrastructure nightmare ?

    I am curious how I can manage so many IPs and how servers I need for something like that.

  • That is the great thing about this setup. There really isnt an infrastructure nightmare. It is one web application running off several servers in a web farm. All of the "distinct" site information is data driven.



    In fact the new application we are building is completely themable (different types of navigation) and completely skinnable (different color scheme's on existing themes)



    There is obviously a backend administration tool that allows our customers to change their current theme, and or any information on their site.





    We use F5 BigIp network load balancers and several windows 2003 servers. It is still under development so I cannot specify exactly how many servers will be used, but we plan to put 2,400 websites into production using only one code base and one application directory spread across multiple servers in a web farm.



    Basically you can use DNS to just point hostnames to 1 single ip that is actually a virtual ip for all of the web farm.



    We have used this same setup in an ASP legacy environment and it worked great. We hosted about 450 seperate sites on 2 web servers operating in a server farm.

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