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August 8th, 2009 
QuadsZilla Back to our questions, stilllearning Asks:
Do you have a favorite type/format for a “2nd Level of Pyramid” site?
To review, the 2nd level of the link Pyramid is where you put your domain portfolio to work. This network of sites is distributed across cheep shared hosting accounts. The more shared hosting accounts you have for this purpose, the smaller your footprint will be.
Wordpress is a powerful CMS who’s footprint is not immediately suspect. It’s a pretty darn good choice because so many great tools are already built for the platform. It’s also a much better choice than rolling your own CMS in the early stages before you’re making serious money with your network.
I’m torn here because I want to be as helpful as possible without shooting myself in the foot. What I can say is that the most important thing for this level (to be able to scale) is to have a console that allows you to manage large chunks of your network at a time from a single login. You can’t be logging into 1000 different blog accounts and 1000 database based sites through 2000 different logins: that just doesn’t work (well, it may work for some, but not for me!).
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What about rolling your own content solution in something nice like rails with nginx in front, hosting on a dedicated server and then using shared hosting accounts with apache configurated as a remote proxy infront of it? That way it’d be much more easily managed at least! Although I’m not technically comptetent enough to make this work, it certainly sounds like something which may be feasible? And perhaps a lot simpler than automating wordpress etc!
You would probably be better off using an existing CMS as a base and focusing your efforts on a central management platform. There are a ton of issues with building a CMS from scratch; you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to retread it.
What ever tool you’ve created to manage your thousands of accounts, have you thought about packaging it and selling it?
Shoemoney did this with his Shoemoney Tools. He wrote a detailed how-to manual about making money in local PPC which just fueled the market for his set of tools.
If you wrote a bunch of blog posts explaining how to do all of this and then also sold the tools to manage such a campaign, I think you could do quite nicely.
I am 100% on board with having a command center for networks. I think what hats are going to start recognizing is how much easier it is to do distributed installs/update/etc using PDO/SQLite instead of MySQL.
When you have to use MySQL for things like WP blogs, it becomes better to write your configs in SQLite and using ob_* or filters to actually do the real work.
Of course once you have a little time/money to actually build a decent CMS for yourself using SQLite then doing multi/update installs becomes as simple a shell script with a list rsync/svn/scp commands.
Ashley – Whatever I sold it for would not be worth having that many more competitors.
–QuadsZilla —
So, is the controller for level 1 and level 2?
Can you take a look at my BH plan for a pyramid?
My plan is as follows:
Spec a Custom word press controller for levels 1 & 2. (@ Get AFreelancer)
4links Use xrum3r for level 1, Use manual folks for level 2
What are some numbers on the planks of 1 & 2 to get results?
I’ll probably do one level 3, and see how the starter plank works.
i’m only going to use affiliate programs
Quadz do you have any techniques/tools to speed up indexing that you’d care to share with us?
I randomly came across a bh site yesterday (via goog alerts for my niche) that has scraped content, lots of redirects etc and even a few malware warnings all on what appears to be auto generated subdomains.
The interesting part is WHOIS shows this domain was only created on the 9th August and yesterday site:domain.com command says “Results 1 – 10 of about 8,230,000″