Question : How many instances of a web application can run on a server

I am developing an ASP.net web application based on a SQL Server 2008 database. I plan on offering it as a hosted application to my customers. I am currently running the initial beta site on a Windows 7 machine with IIS 7 and SQL Server Express.

I have been looking into several hosting options, including Google and GoDaddy. I am trying to estimate the hosting costs and need to determine how many instances of my application I can run on each server. Each customer will have their own instance of the application in their own website hosted on IIS.

Can someone tell how to determine or estimate how many websites / webapps a single server can host?

Thank you.

Answer : How many instances of a web application can run on a server

Three factors to consider

1. Upload bandwith
2. Server Power
3. App Execution Load and weight

There is no rule of thumb, for instance a iis server serving a simple .html file could do it several hunred times a minute

but take a heavy aspx file and perforamce is dramatically reduced,

really you just have to "suck it and see"