[wp-hackers] WordPress Hosting: Individual Sites vs Network

[danilo]

Hello John,
IMHO if you're familiar with a LAMP environment you should have few to 
none hassle in developing a safe environment using single installs even 
without help from some panel software.
As an example, with a simple bash script you'd be able to create a new 
directory under your Apache docroot and using svn you'd install the 
latest WordPress stable version in here, then your script would add a 
user/database to mysql and deliver some login information to your 
customer's email...

Using this setup you'll be able to do a safe upgrade every time a new 
stable release comes out, it would simply be a matter of setting up a 
cron job to check for every directory in your docroot and do an "svn up" 
in it..

for better handling lots of installs, you could keep just one svn 
WordPress install as a master and let your script do the install/update 
directly from your local copy, also saving your bandwidth and CPU 
work... This same principle applies to mysql, you could keep an sql dump 
of an already set up WordPress db and use it as your "template".

Of course you should still have to set up some other few things like 
FTP, but in the end I think you'd have much more control over your system.

Of course this is not a complete answer, I'm pretty sure there's 
something I forgot to point out, so take it just as a starting point.

Hope it helps..
-- 
Danilo aka danix
http://danixland.net