SharePoint 2010 - Hosting a Tenant in a Web App vs Site Collection
if every tenant is hosted in its own web application :
pros :
1- separate web.config
2- separate SLA (like access channels, zones, etc...)
3- separate management for IIS (since IIS can see the wep application level)
cons :
1- different socket (IP:Port) even if we have to use host headers. it is a separate socket
2- aloooooot of overhead for managing diff web apps
3- not scalable (when we reach a large number of tenants we cannot provision each one as a web app) as compared to site collections
4- share same web.config
5- some IIS features (example bit rate throttling) will only be configured per web app