I am looking for advice on the best way to host a set of databases. My goal it to allow multiple customers to access their own database on my server over the internet. I am doing that right now for my own database.

The issues I'm struggling with are:

1) How can I share multiple databases with multiple customers and insure that customers can only see their database in the list of avaialble databases on the server? Both file sharing and IWP expose the names of EVERY shared database on the server when logging in.

2) How realiable is this? How about performance?

3) The part that really scares me is security.

Is anyone else trying this and have you been successful? Any big issues?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Download the Server Tech Brief or the Security Tech Brief from the FMI web site. They contain valuable information for you.

FileMaker Server allows you to restrict what someone sees when that oerson accesses the Server. This is call database visibility or file filtering. Employing this results in a given user's being able to see ONLY his or her "own" files.

Steven

Thanks, Steven.

Any other top level thougts about hosting databases over the web? Have you or anyone you know of done this successfully?

How about performance? I potentially could have up to 50 databases with up to the max of 250 concurrent connections.

What about security? My database stores credit card info? Should I be overly concerned about that?

My database stores credit card info? Should I be overly concerned about that?

Yes,you should be concerned if credit card numbers are stored.

Steven

Lets assume you aren't a PHP Expert and you are not going publish multiple web sites on IIS and you are going to use the Instant Web Publishing.

If you are going to only have one server, this how I would do it on the one server.

I would have:

Windows Server 2003

FileMaker Pro Server Advanced 9

The trick is this, once you have everything setup and you are running the testing filemaker files with the server go to IIS and select the default website (if not sites have been created) export the site structure to xml. Then add another web site but build from file-then select the xml file. Go into each site now and change the host headers to what ever you want the websites to be called. After that you have two IWP connections setup with iis.

Now change the IWP home page to a redirect page that will send the request to a new home page on IIS wwwroot. Setup a custom login page by using code that looks like this::

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Now when they are redirected to that page you can make their company logos or names on the page have them login from there, also each client can have their own web address.

Pretty Cool Stuff.

Edited October 14, 200817 yr by Guest

I'm hosting 25 FM Advanced Pro apps on a single PC-architecture system using VMWare, with 25 virtual machines each hosting one app.

I needed to support few users (less than 2-3 concurrent) and low usage rate (5-20 logins per day, per server).

PC: $600 worth of HW. 3Ghz multicore, 3GB RAM, 160GB drives mirrored. SUSE Linux base OS, VmWare. VMWare partitions running WinXP, 192MB RAM, 5GB storage, unique copy of FM Pro. SIngle IP Address for whole server.

Each company licenses a copy of FMPro. Each FMPro instance configured to listen to a specific TCP Port. Users have a URL that specifies the TCP port to connect to "their" copy of FMPro with their app.

I believe this to be far more robust than using FM Server, as I believe VMware does an excellent job of shared resource management and time slicing.

What about security? My database stores credit card info? Should I be overly concerned about that?

Yeah, that is a major issue. If there is a breach and stolen card numbers are used to commit fraud, the merchant may be liable for up to $500,000 in fines per instance!

We have a technology in our gateway (NELiX TransaX Payment Gateway) called the "Customer Vault", which allows you to send an initial transaction (i.e. a $1.00 auth) to the database and return a "Vault ID". The Vault ID could then be used instead of credit card numbers when issuing subsequent transactions. This would take the liability off the merchant as no credit card data would be stored in the database.

Integration between FileMaker and our gateway is extremely easy, and we have example FileMaker integrations that we can share that shows how set this up (and is easy to cut and paste into your database). Let me know if you are interested in learning more.

Take a look at http://www.transaxdevelopers.com/filemaker or contact me at [email protected] for more info.