Multiple sites on one web server vs users specifying organization

Question

I have a website which supports multiple organizations having multiple users logging into it. The way the setup currently works is that everyone goes to the same site and provide their organization, user name, and password to log in.

Yesterday, I had the idea that it would be easier if we provided each organization with their own site on the server. So, for example, instead of going to www.example.com and putting in org1, user1, pwd1, they could just go to org1.example.com and put in user1 and pwd1.

This would seem to have the following advantages:

• Easier interface for user. They could bookmark their particular site and only have to enter username and password
• Easier maintenance. Changes to web.config for one org or restarting the site could be done without affecting users from other org's.
• More versatile. Settings can be different for different organizations

However, I'm wondering what, if any, disadvantages there would be?

Answer 1

There doesn't need to be any disadvantages, if the websites are programmed correctly.

Please note that you do not really need to change anything in the current setup, except furnish this one login page. All sub-websites can, after the user & password are entered, converge to the same body of code as they do today, no separation required. The logged-in sub-website can be specified and propagated via cookies or an additional parameter on all URLs or some other mechanism for global data.

If you do decide on separate code-bases, you will encounter the need to propagate improvements and developments from one to the other, and this will become more and more complicated as time goes on and the code keeps on diverging.

From hard experience, I can say that deciding on separate codes may give birth to websites that become progressively more complicated to maintain as they continue to multiply, so that in the end maintenance and resync considerations may cause development to be postponed or even be blocked, until some brave soul decides to junk it all and restart from scratch.