1 big site vs. 100 small sites

Article written by Liza Kliko

Many webmasters keep asking themselves this question: what is better, to keep all the eggs in one basket, and make it a big, impressive and high traffic basket, or… spread them across small servers, different domains and target to various niches.

Each of these techniques has its advantages and disadvantages, while some are a matter of personal preference, others an objective conclusion based on bare-bone facts. Lets start with the first case, in which we will register one domain, and make one, huge website, and see what do we get in these circumstances…

• Advantages:

1. Cheaper. Since you only need one domain and one hosting account, you will spare a lot money while starting and maintaining the site, even if you are going to purchase design and some scripts / platform, you will still need it only for one website, i.e. the quantity won’t multiply itself, neither will the cost.
2. Easy control. It’s much faster to find out daily if one website is online, rather that start checking up on many different domains / sites. If anything is out of order, one site is easier to handle and monitor.
3. One primarily email. As you only have one domain, you will have one root email, which can be used for contacting the webmaster in case of problems or just feedback. Easy to check and access, faster and no hassle.

• Disadvantages:

1. Lose it all. If, for whatever reason, the site goes offline, or any othere server problems are causing dowtime or disstability, you automatically lose it all, even if temporarily. Same goes if the domain expires, get revoked or suspended.
2. Inability to create a network. As you only have one website, you are unable to have your other sites to link to each other and generate circulating traffic.
3. Limited Niche. It will be rather unprofessional to compress a several assorted subjects in one site, unless they are at least somehow related, i.e. you are limiting your audience and traffic to only one specific niche, which does not guarantee success.

Now to the other case, when we “throttle” the material we are willing to share online and create a network of website. This option also has a few sides, let us see what downsides and upsides will webmasters who go with this decision get…

• Advantages:

1. More security. As mentioned already, if one domain gets revoked, or if one host goes offline, you do not lose all your traffic or see the revenue gets cut, as it will only be one “cell” in your network of website and won’t affect your overall income, if terminated.
2. Links Network. A several domains, hosted on different hosts and IP addresses, while linking to each other - create a circle of links which will pump traffic from one website to another and help your PR to grow, as it’s expected that some of your websites will have stronger PR and SE position than the others, and in this case, you can link from your high PR sites to the lower PageRank sites, artificially increasing their value, without having to pay any third party domain for linking to you.
3. Various niches, big income. Various websites, that deal with different content (and consequently keywords, audience, etc) allow you to gather bigger audience; wider variety of age range, location and interest of your visitors. As a result, you can earn money not only by targetting people to buy or click a certain type of ads, but a broad range of products for specific traffic orientation. In other words, targeted marketing is ten times easier when you know who are you targetting at.

• Disadvantages:

1. Very expensive. Since you need to purchase many domains, and a few (at least, let’s say, three) web host accounts from different hosting companies, it will come to quite a big annual bill, which may not be affordable (and justified) at the beginning, while your websites still do not generate revenue, enough to cover the costs.
2. Significantly more work. All the sites you make must have their own design. That’s some extra work and time to make multiple layouts and code them, them put them all online up and running.
3. Harder to monitor. Naturally, you’d want to check on your websites on every possible occasion, just to make sure they are online and everything is fine; having a big amount of sites will consume a lot of time, especially if each of them points to a different email address that you ought to check separately.

Okay, this was a brief overview of positive and negative aspects in both cases. Of course, breaking one big site not necessarily has to come down to one hundred of website, this was just roughly speaking to give you an idea.

My personal opinion? I’d say make a few sites, and make them different. There is no point in making 10 stall sites about articles with similar layout, structure and more or less identical content, because if your visitor did not like the first site, he wont find the others any useful as well, while if he did like it, he will stick with the site he visited first, bookmark it and won’t look further. Some people find bright layouts to be irritating, others love it. Some websites’ content are more targeted to the older audience while others are mostly visited by teens, and if you have a wide variety of website, you can play wise with your traffic and make the maximum out of it, for both yours and visitor’s benefit.

Hope this helps you to decide. Good luck starting off your own little online empire!