I have two web applications in ASP.NET which are quite the same (same business logic, same DAL, same DB scheme but different instance).
The only thing that I need to change is the design (logo, color,…) and the text (global and local resource) to adress two separate business sector. We cannot “subdomain” the application because we need the two app “seems to be” independant.
Is it a good idea to run only one instance for the 2 web applications.
For example :
I will have 2 hostnames : mycompagny.com and mycompagny2.com and I will put an HTTP Module which will set a string which will be propagated in my application like ‘company’ and ‘company2’. I will instanciate the dal only once but the connection string will change depending on the string ‘company’ or ‘company2’.
Any pros and cons ? Any other alternatives ?
[Updated]
Just for information it is a Multi-Business and Multi-Tenant application because both application will have custom theme for some parts of the application.
For example :
mycompagny.com/Busineess1, mycompagny.com/Busineess2, mycompagny.com/Busineess3,..
and
mycompagny2.com/Busineess2, mycompagny2.com/Busineess2, mycompagny2.com/Busineess3,…
It sounds like you are describing a Multi-Tenant application. Here is a nice overview of some of the challenges of working Multi-Tenant in ASP.Net. There is actually quite a lot of information being produced recently on Multi-Tenant ASP.Net MVC applications, so that is also worth a look.