Multi-tenancy support: Umbraco vs Orchard Project

Question

I am currently using an older version of Umbraco (4.03) and I have several basic sites (mostly 1 pagers) running under the same IIS Application.

I have a shared hosting account with Winhost.com, which doesn't offer multiple site application roots, just domain pointers, so I'm limited to a single CMS installation that supports multi-tenancy.

The Umbraco multi-tenancy setup is a bit hacky and I really need to upgrade. It seems that Orchard is more focused on multi-tenancy support. My Umbraco installation has some issues with shared skins, which has always been a little annoying.

So, the basic question:

Just based on the multi-tenancy scenario, has anyone had experience of both Umbraco and Orchard that can give me an opinion / comparison? If so, is the new version of Umbraco any better than the version i am using with regards to its multi-site support?

P.S. I'm aware there are a few questions on SO already concerning comparisons between the two CMS projects but I am specifically interested in a multi-tenancy comparison.

Answer 1

Let me start by saying that Orchard is a brilliant CMS, from what I've seen of it so far I prefer it to Umbraco.

But one word of warning, I had problems running a very small Orchard site on cheap shared hosting (in fact I was also using winhost) because of app pool memory limits. Orchard is quite memory hungry and in my case would jump to around 100mb of memory within a few page views. Most shared hosting packages limit the app pool to 100mb so in my case it was recycling the app pool on every other page view. See this thread as an example. I ended up using Umbraco instead.

Sorry, I know this is a bit off topic and doesn't answer the multi-tenancy question. But test for this early on in development.

Answer 2

The latest version of Umbraco has essentially the same multi-tenancy setup as it had in 4.03. You can assign a domain to any content item directly under the "Content" folder in the Content section of the admin.

I have done a few multi-site setups with Umbraco and I can understand how the skinning piece gets interesting fast. We have used a CSS based solution to the skinning issue (select CSS files at the root). That seemed better than a whole different set of Templates for each site.

Any thoughts on how you would like it to work? Could be a good package in there somewhere.

Sorry, I can't answer the Orchard piece as I haven't used it and only have cursory knowledge of it.