ASP.NET multi-Tenant Application

Question

I have an Asp.net application 3.5. I want to be able to allow multiple/ different clients to access the same application but using different URL\'s. I have already managed to co

Answer 1

The common case is that you'll have to configure a new virtual site for each of your new tenants during account provisioning. See Creating a New Virtual Server on how to achieve this programatically. Some though argue (with convincing arguments...) that spinning up an appdomain for each tenant is a waste of resources and one should use routing in the application that inspect the HOST header, see Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Introduction.

Configuring IIS/ASP to respond to your tenant sub-dmains is the easy part. The real problem will be to configure DNS for your tenants, and that depends on your DNS solution.

Answer 2

To have different url's using the same application, i would use "301 redirect" subdomains. I'm not really sure how to have a webapp create these subdomains.

Answer 3

I think the way to do this is to make the website the default website on the server i.e. configure so all requests to the servers IP hit this website (unless the header matches another website that explicitly looks for it). You do this just by not specifying a header on the IIS settings (only an IP address and a port number) - you can only do this for one site per IP address/port combination on the server.

Then look at the request url in the website to determine which domain was requested.

This way there is no need to 'create' subdomains... but you do need to reject all request to a domain that you don't want to recognize.

If you can't do this then you would need to adjust the IIS metabase from the application - not impossible - but a very risky and probably a bad idea.

Answer 4

I finally found out the solution that I wanted, so I thought I would share with you my finding. It turns out I needed to create a web application from another running Asp.net web application (From C# Code)

This tutorial by Robbe Morris was really helpful if you need to get started on this.

Another article you might want to check out is this one.