Domain Takeoff

Q: Why should you care about private blog networks? What are their advantages?
A: First of all, if you are after SEO benefits, owning a private blog network is a very powerful tool. You can leverage multiple domains for backlinks or specialize different sites to resonate with very narrow segments within your audience - age, language, geography, buying power are each available to slice target demographics into more manageable chunks.
Second, and equally important, is the need to test and leverage different content or messages about the same product, sometimes too incompatible to keep under the same roof. By grouping different sites belonging to the same project into a private network and monitoring their aggregated performance, you can soon divide them into performance tiers - direct sellers that have the highest ability to turn visitors into leads vs top-of-the-funnel sites receiving plenty of traffic and SEO juice but not as favored with click-throughs and conversion.
And last, if you are an agency managing micro-sites and company blogs for a large number of clients, you definitely want to save your writers' time and empower them with tools that allow them to focus on publishing and engaging with the readers, rather then undermine their productivity with WordPress maintenance, downtime or multiple logins.

Q: How do you start? What is expected of you?
A: First of all finish reading this page, or send us your questions through a quick e-mail to support (a) soliber (dot) net.
When ready, place an order and purchase a suitable plan. Do not worry if you don't have lots of domain names initially - you can upgrade plans at any time. Also worth noting we offer a discount for paying for your plan in advance instead of monthly installments.
All accounts are manually created after payment verification - your username will serve as the main subdomain in cPanel, the webhosting management tool that we use to give you access to your account. Upon registration you will receive a welcome e-mail with instructions how to claim your account and you are ready to go. Now you are ready to start deploying WordPress and add more domains to your network. If you have any questions at any stage, simply send a message to the support e-mail address and we will assist you all the way.

Q: How much disk space will you need? Are 2.5GB really enough to start a private blog network?
A: Each vanilla WordPress installation takes about 18MB of disk space or less than 1% of the disk space available even on the smallest plans we have. With content, local backups and activity logs, each website is expected to grow up to maximum 100MB, or less than 10% of the available disk space. Nevertheless, in case you need more room simply raise a support ticket and we will increase your quota within reasonable limits to accommodate your request. Remember, your Domain Takeoff account is not simply hosting - you can have a few domains on our servers, but to use it at its full potential you should configure it to manage your sites hosted by any other 3rd party hosting company from a centralized location.

Q: Can Domain Takeoff offer "unlimited traffic" with its plans like regular hosting providers?
A: We are firmly convinced that buyers looking to invest in launching private blog networks are already aware there is no such thing as "unlimited" - the mainstream webhosting industry is overselling resources and relies on cancellation of CPU/disk/bandwidth-intensive accounts when forced to show the goods. In the struggle to provide a professional service we had to sacrifice some of these unrealistic claims. In the event your usage overgrows your account quotas we will be happy to work with you and meet any realistic expectations. We are not, however, capping the traffic associated with serving static files (images, Javascript, CSS and HTML content) - these are not counted against your plans quota once the websites run through the CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Q: You already manage a few sites built on WordPress yourself. Why not continue towards growing them into a private blog network of tens or hundreds of domains on your own?
A: Our experience shows that managing large numbers of WordPress sites individually, especially when they are used for backlinking or lead-generation rather than engagement with the readers, is a time-consuming task. If established websites can justify such treatment, launching new websites for the purpose of growing them over time is hardly worth the same level of micro-management. Mass WordPress upgrades, plugin and theme updates, even refreshing content every few days wastes time with multiple logins and jumping between hosting providers. Reliable backups and rank tracking can turn into tedious chores every week. Especially if you are an agency or entrepreneur working on several projects/networks at the same time, centralizing WordPress management and hosting can easily free several hours per day for your or your employees.

Q: What if you require SEO-hosting for your private network?
A: We need to make it clear from the beginning that nobody here at Domain Takeoff condones linkfarm practices and any other blackhat SEO techniques. With this said, we have the ability to host individual sites in your private network on different C-class IP addresses, and even offer those in various countries (to date US, CA, UK, most EU members, AU and JP). Coupled with careful promotion via Google Places, this can provide a huge competitive advantage when entering local markets. Please remain aware that Google's recommendations against abusive schemes apply and that the private nature of our hosted networks is not meant as a free-for-all permission to build pyramid or linkwheel types of inter-linking. Recent events have shown Google to be extremely effective at detecting and deindexing such networks, and the bad episodes experienced by some major brands should serve as a lesson into what is worth or not in terms of compromising online assets.

Q: What are content credits*?
A: Here at Domain Takeoff we agree that launching a blog network is not an easy task - besides setting up the hosting and management of each WordPress site, you have to think about deploying the right plugins to serve the purpose of the network, choose proper templates and write some initial content. Since we have the expertise, professional themes and the copywriters already, we think it's easier to help each new client bootstrap the network with a $75 bonus worth 5-10 original, good quality articles or one of your websites setup with the recommended plugins, settings and a professional template to give you a starting point. You can even clone that website from the dashboard and replicate the settings to your entire network and we actually prefer you do that - it's easy to forget how to setup the caching or SEO plugins when deploying sites one-by-one, and this will save you a lot of time in the beginning.