Hi -

I am trying to understand parent/child portals and how the two work together and the benefits of each.  As I understand it, you can setup a parent site, say at www.xyz.com and then any child sites would be located under www.xyz.com\child1. 

However, what if you want sites all with their own domain names. www.xyz.com, www.123.com etc. Would it make sense to create a parent site, (www.xyz.com) and then put www.123.com as a child site under it?  I am testing this, and can't get the portal alias to work correctly - I have the two domains, but the child site only comes up with www.123.com\child1.

Is the thinking behind child sites really just to allow users to have their own DNN under the parent domain? 

If that is the case, would it be better to just setup individual DNN installations for each domain? In my case these are separate entities, and don't really need subsites...

Is it possible to export a site that was setup as a child site into a newly created DNN parent site?

Thanks.

Is the process of setting up a parent portal similar to a child portal? A check box I might have missed somewhere?  I presume that like the child portal setup, a parent portal "shares" account information - making it truly for related sites only?  I can see why your rule of thumb would fit ...

to do multiple separate installs of DNN on the same server, installation is the same as before, only installing DNN to separate directories, and separate SQL database names?  I could setup virtual hosts, and if I only had one live IP, use host headers to point incoming requests to each site?

Do you have any information (links) about migrating a child portal to a stand alone install? I presume it's an export of some sort...

thanks for all your help.