Multi-tenant PHP SaaS - Separate DB's for each client, or group them?

Question

You\'ll have to bear with me here for possibly getting some of the terminology slightly wrong as I wasn\'t even aware that this fell into the whole \'multi-tenant\' \'softwa

Answer 1

When many years ago I designed a platform for building SaaS applications in PHP, I opted for the third option: multi tenant code and single tenant databases.

In my experience, that is the most scalable option, but it also needs a set of scripts to propagate changes when updating code, DB schemes, enabling applications to a tenant, etc.

So a lot of my effort went in building a component based, extensible engine to fully automate all those tasks and minimize system administration stuff. I strongly advise to build such an architecture if you want to adopt the third option.