Dynamic Central Serving of Full Web App to Thousands of Different Domains?

skipcollege

I'm familiar with building small simple scripts for an individual site but now I need to build a more complex web app that works across hundreds of thousands of separate domains & web servers.

I don't believe it is a good idea to install a separate databases and php application files for each domain (hundreds of thousands) because we I will be needing to make improvements to the application as time goes along and it would be a nightmare to manage and keep consistent across that many different domains & web servers.

So, I'd like to keep the database and php application files all on one central web server and I'm wondering how to pull this off?

The way I envision a solution is to upload a index.php and admin.php file to each domain's web server that has the client's unique account info in it. Then when someone browses to the tld, the index.php file would go out over the internet to the central application server to get the whole website/data for that account and display it back to the domain that the internet surfer browsed to (not needing to know about the central server at all). Also each client will need to manage/change their domain's website by going to admin.php, logging in, and making the changes to the central database. However, I want it to work like the index.php file where it downloads the admin UI and interacts with the php application files on the central web server to manage the account. So that is 1 central set of application files, 1 central database, 100,000+ client domains, only 2 files on each client domain (index.php & admin.php).

Would this be a good solution in your opinion?

If so, how do you go about getting the whole application to load through another domain using just 1 php file (index.php or admin.php)?

I could really use some help with this one since it is critical to an important business in the next few months.

Thank you very much for any help! 🙂

bpat1434

In my opinion, if they all use Linux, make sure they can use rsync. If they can, then why not use a CVS or SVN repository to keep your code in-line, and then have a cron set up to rsync between the remote domains and the local one. This way, each night your code is updated with the newest code. You can write a quick bash script that will look into the "tags" repo and looks for a newer tag than the one previously downloaded. So when you're ready roll out changes, all you have to do is create a "tag" and then wait for the other servers to run the rsync cron and then you'll have the updated code on all your remote servers.

That's the way I would go. I currently maintain about 30 sites running the same app (well, almost every site has a different version of the app) and I'm getting annoyed. This is something I'm looking into since it would cut down my development time (and all sites would be upgraded almost instantly).

Is that understandable?

Of course you could always point all your domains to one server and then you're down to running just one install... but if your one server goes down, then they're all down.

I'd suggest the rsync way. Otherwise, you have a single point of failure for thousands of domains which isn't a good thing 😉

skipcollege

Yeah, that does make sense. Thank you B!

Now I'll have to learn those technologies. 😕

bpat1434

They're not difficult to learn. I myself don't use them (yet?) but they are a really good asset if you can harness it well-enough.

MarkR

I would say, serve all the domains from the same copy of the code - have PHP dynamically read HTTP_HOST to determine which domain it's trying to serve up, and affect its behaviour accordingly.

Use a single database (or set of databases if partitioning vertically, horizontally, or load balancing or anything like that) for the entire app and have all the web servers run the same code and connect to the same DB.

It is trivial to set up a web server (e.g. Apache) to serve the same content on several domains, or even a wildcard (hint: UseCanonicalName is your friend)

Mark

bradgrafelman

MarkR wrote:
have PHP dynamically read HTTP_HOST to determine which domain it's trying to serve up, and affect its behaviour accordingly.

The only problem is that you're limiting the website to HTTP 1.1 browsers only.

MarkR

bradgrafelman wrote:
The only problem is that you're limiting the website to HTTP 1.1 browsers only.

That's not true. Any browser which sends the "Host" header would be allowed, regardless of what version it uses (HTTP/1.1 requires "Host", but 1.0 does not forbid it).

Even users who are forced to use 1.0 (e.g. by strange proxies) will still be able to use the sites.

There is no other way of sensibly running 1000s of sites anyway as you'd have to allocate lots of IP addresses, which is expensive and will likely cause routing issues.

Mark

bradgrafelman

True. Guess I've just faced some weird situations with 1.0 requests where I didn't have the HOST header to use.