Hosting and managing are critical to a blog network (or even a single blog). When you scale things up it becomes all the more essential that you have good systems in place. You don’t actually need a lot of money to launch a blog network – however it does help and it does accelerate the growth significantly.
When we started applying WordPress to our projects a few good years ago, the software had some rough edges. Most important, performance and security were major concerns. From v2.1 to 3.3.1 at the time of writing, things did not change fundamentally. What changed was the momentum behind each version update, the rush to incorporate best practices into the code and the sheer mass of the community of users that rely on self-hosted WordPress installations.
Many experienced bloggers assume that moving from one domain to tens or hundreds requires just a linear increase in resources, or even less so due to resource aggregation. It might even be true for mammoths like WordPress.com or their close competitors. But the picture is very different when applying WordPress as a CMS to enterprise clients, in affiliate marketing or as part of larger SEO strategies. No longer are all blogs in the network joined at the hip like a simple multi-site WordPress network. They might be required to answer from different IP addresses, sometimes in different geographic locations, run specialized A/B tests or serve as content-rich sources of backlinks in very competitive verticals. Security and project separation are also major concerns for any agency – same writers working on different accounts, having to log in back and forth between domains to keep content fresh and engaging. Think especially about the role and potential of WordPress as a CMS in large multi-nationals – who will manage twenty mini-sites in 8 languages for a household brand present in US, EU and China, when a developer can piece together a nice template in a few days, but the client and most often the agency must pilot that through different groups for approval, share publishing rights, account for advertisement budgets and at the same time worry about uptime, backups and privacy?
These are just a few of the challenges Domain Takeoff is setup to address. There are many others we might be able to fix as well – like reducing the go-to-market lead time for website developers, allowing affiliate marketers more time to drive traffic to a flexible CMS platform that can adapt to any layout or template and even optimizing spend for large lead-generation businesses in very competitive verticals like insurance or house improvements. Join us – it’s time we take off together.
