Network & infrastructure safety
Run a domain network + host client sites without getting caught or trapped.
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How to run a domain network and host client sites without getting caught or locked in.
Hide a network in the noise (Cloudflare name servers)
Greg-Morrison-style PBNs get caught: trash-looking sites, same IP, same registrar, no privacy. Garrett Alcott's safer method:
- Turn on WHOIS privacy on every domain — now the only link left is the IP.
- Add each domain to Cloudflare. It assigns one of ~13 different name-server sets and rotates across many IPs; millions of sites share each name server, so there's no clean way to tie your domains together.
- Free, and Cloudflare is worth having anyway.
Building a full Greg-Morrison PBN is a ton of work and only pays if you sell links. FoxNews owns ~17,000 domains all linking to itself — a PBN, but they're real publishers, so they're fine. Be the real-publisher version.
Exact-match domains
- Exact-match / keyword domains rank well right now despite the "stay away" chorus — you see them all over local search.
- The catch: link-building with exact-match anchors. Google is sensitive (not hostile) to them. Pillow the anchors with DAS — use a lot.
- Cheap test: spin up one-pagers (legal pages + contact form, to address EAT) on Cloudflare Pages for a niched client's spare domains, let them run, promote any that rank to a real host. They're the client's domains, so no cost if they fry.
Own the racecourse
(James Schramko's rule.) Own your platform; don't bet a business on a free tier you don't control.
- Free Cloudflare Pages is great for testing, but own your hosting before a real business depends on it. (Cloudflare's $20/mo beats typical hosting; you can also buy single features, e.g. Argo at $5/mo.)
- Never take control of a client's domain or hosting. The Sesame dental-CRM story: free redesign, contract says they own 95% of your content, they talk you into transferring your domain — quit and you lose content, CRM, and domain. If the client controls domain + hosting, they always own their business and you avoid the drama.
Turbo Subdomains (TSD) — optional scale tool
Garrett Alcott's subdomain-network tool. License $2K–$10K + $197/license; Clint paid ~$3K for 2 sites × 500 subdomains = a 1,000-site network at ~$500/mo. The value is auto-publishing (sites are always doing something); DIY and you own the publishing problem. System is janky — turn-and-burn for now. With Sonic + Claude you could replicate it (design → template → all subdomains → default pages → topical map per site → 150 scheduled posts ≈ 2 years of content). See Build stack.
Client reporting
Tell clients up front: no reports. Install a change-history plugin so they can see exactly what you're doing, and they already have GSC + GA. No reason to bill for restating free data (export the change log if a client insists).