Best Practice for hosting mulitple web applications on a single port [ 80 or 443 ] in SharePoint Farm

Question

I would like to add multiple web applications on my SP Farm. Is it a best practice that, we can have multiple web applns created on the Production Farm.

Please enlighten , whether we can have multiple web applications created multiple port numbers on a production SP Farm created for the multiple requirements.

OR

is it somewhere mentioned in MSDN, recommended by MSFt , that only one port number would be used and on the same port number we can have multiple web applications.

if i elaborate am having a leave sharepoint application hosted on 80 port . Am going to have another web app called HRHelpDesk created and it needs to be hosted on the same SP Farm.

Should I go on and create new port number called say,1000 and host the hrhelpdesk on this 1000 port.

Answer 1

Since you're on the internal network and run your farm inside a firewall protected area, you should use the same port 80 for HTTP traffic and port 443 for HTTPS traffic.

When you create a new web app, you need to fill in the field "Host Header" which separates the port 80 applications in ISS from each other.

In the path, which updates automatically based on your entries in Port and Host Header, you'll see that your new web app will have its own directory, which you can see here.

And you can see your web apps in Central Administration by Name, URL and port

This is the best practice, since you don't have to worry that some ports are closed for whatever reason by the IT department.

Answer 2

I strongly recommend to have only one content Web Application on port 443 and one admin Web Application. Then create your site collections as host-named site collections instead of path-based site collections. It's a far more efficient, scalable and flexible architecture. This is also how Microsoft hosts site collections in Office 365. With Web Applications you're practically limited to 20 different host headers. With HSNC you can support as many sub-domain as needed with a single Web Application. For example:

• https://intrant.contoso.com
• https://search.contoso.com
• https://mysite.contoso.com

Multiple host-named site collections can use the same host-header. For example:

• https://intrant.contoso.com/
• https://intrant.contoso.com/sites/site1
• https://intrant.contoso.com/sites/site2
• https://intrant.contoso.com/projects/project1

Also, always secure your sites with SSL! Also on your internal network!! HTTP sites is a thing of the past.

I would only recommend multiple content Web Applications if you need total isolation between them or if you need to install and support a third-party application that needs special configuration on that level.

Answer 3

Just to add to Benny's answers:

• Using port 80 and 443 means you don't have to rely on end users having to type in port numbers
• Hopefully does not need saying but make sure your host headers are added to DNS
• Be aware of resources. Don't get carried away with creating many web apps. Have a look into host named site collections.

Answer 4

It is mainly depend upon the your requirement and infrastructure( hardware). SharePoint can have upto 20 web application in the farm along with 10 App pools.

So,you can have multiple web application in SharePoint farm But keep in mind every new web application will be add extra load on the servers. If you want only 2 or 3 web apps, i dont think it will be an issue. Other option is use the host name site collection but for only few things, i think not a good idea as MSFT also admitting that HNSC is not a good solution on prem farm.

Now, You have two options to create the web applications.

Using the Standard Port( 80/443): (it is recommended way)you can create multiple web application on port 80 but you have to create FDQN host headers for this.When you create the web application in host header section put that url and then update the IIS.

Using non Standard Ports: you can create the web application on different port without host headers but url will be http://server name :port number...if you use the FQDN then you can update the AAM bindings then user can access it without port number. But this approach will cause the alot issues, if you are using the web service then chrome & other browser will fail to excute it.