Strategy question for setting up a community site/service.

[rdurbin]

I am building a service that will let people signup to create their own site. Each site will be hosted and will contain a blog, gallery and other specific functional areas. I am expecting (hoping) that there will be around 1,000 active accounts.

I am worried that if I build the site so that there is one mySQL DB and one set of php scripts that the infrastructure will not be able to handle the traffic of each of the 1,000 sites.

My other concern is I want this to be easy to maintain/update. I don't ever want to have to manually dig through and edit files for each site.

So, how do the following options sound? Am I on track here?

Option 1

• all data in mySQL

• no file structure at all (pages would be served by .htaccess mod_rewrite going to a master php script that pushes requests off to relevant scripts)

Option 2

• all data in mySQL

• basic file structure with pages including to global scripts

Option 3

• all data in txt files or xml (this approach is would be much more distributed)

• basic file structure with pages including to global scripts

Thanks much for your time!
Reid