INFO: Multiple Site Support in Commerce Server versions 2000 and 4.0 (310721)

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Shared hosting is not supported. Shared hosting is a service that is provided by an Application Service Provider. An Application Service Provider serves pages for multiple Web sites, which may or may not have their own Internet domain names, from a single Web server.
Multiple site support is supported as long as none of the resources are shared between sites, including the data warehouse. Multiple site support refers to supporting multiple Web sites across a Web farm, in which a single Web server serves pages from a single Web site.
Multiple applications in a single Web site are supported.
We strongly recommend that there are no more than 10 applications for each Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server. Potential usability issues may occur with the Commerce Server Administrative interface (MMC) if there are more than 10 applications for each server. With each application, the query to obtain data from the Commerce admin database grows. This growth can cause delays and may eventually cause the administrative interface to become unresponsive. Additionally, if you add multiple Commerce applications, more memory will be consumed, CPU utilization may increase, and SQL contention may potentially occur. We recommend that you test your environment thoroughly and you add additional IIS servers as applicable depending on your individual site performance.

The following are Commerce Server terminology definitions from the Commerce Server 2000 glossary:

Application: From a Commerce Server 2000 administration standpoint, an application is an Application Service Provider application accessible through a single Uniform Resource Locator (URL). An application appears in both the Commerce Server and Internet Information Services (IIS) console trees. The application that appears in the Commerce Server Manager console tree is a logical representation of the application in IIS.
Site: In Commerce Server Manager, a container for Commerce Server applications and site-level resources. For example, the Retail site contains two applications: the business-to-consumer Web site and the business-to-consumer Commerce Server Business Desk, and both share the same site-level resources.