Its official, we’ve defected to the Russians.

I really like litespeed, mostly because it has a simple web interface to manage your virtual hosts, environments and all their settings. I’m seriously over a shell console and typing, programmers really need to get a clue about the power of interface design and a mouse…

Anyway, we did an minor upgrade to rails 2+ and some of our apps just wouldn’t start under litespeed anymore, but the mogrels were fine, so we decided to dump litespeed and run with nginx.

Scared of the install, setup, configs and options at first, I decided to make a night of it, I bought a case of redbull and Heineken and sat down ready be confronted with lots of issues to fix and a massive learning curve to get over.

Turns out I was finished in about 15 minutes – on my development environment, and in 10 minutes more my staging and productions servers we’re also up and running on nginx – with clustered mongrels.

So I put the redbulls back in the fridge and cracked open the Heinekens

Anyway, yeah, nginx is surprisingly simple to setup and use, it apparently can get complicated but I didn’t see any of that. Our local dev server was running in about 15 minutes with a 5 mongrel cluster, nginx is using next to nothing and its all running beautify, don’t know why I never used it in the first place… actually I do, because everywhere said it was a bitch to setup and use… litespeed was harder!

My verdict is to use nginx over just about anything else, I’ve used apache, litespeed, lighthttpd, and some others, nginx kicks all of them in every area.

I was curiously running some numbers this morning and I’ve decided to share the results.

If you don’t know already, I’ve sold my web application development business and I’m now in investment mode.

My next simple plan is to start acquiring sites to build a different – diverse portfolio of investments and new revenue streams. My thought was to throw $10k at 4 sites to simply start making $4k a month – a livable income, but I have a livable income already and some, so instead I might acquire smaller sites and more of them to achieve the same effect, $4k per month revenue.

However, I’m going to do it in such a way that almost anyone who has a fulltime income can do – if they can find some disposable income every month to set aside to invest that is.

Why? Well finding sites that are in the $10k range isn’t easy, there’s not as many around as there are $1k sites, so it’s slow going and slim pickings. Other reason is that I’d like to acquire a wider range of sites and see if we can’t network a few together, do some link building campaigns and build the traffic and revenue on them. If we can we might sell (flip) a few of them along the way down the track to speed up some revenue growth.

Ok, so here it is - the plan from $0 a month to $4k a month in 14 months.

What you will need: An endless stream of money, some internet skills and a server.

When I say an endless stream of money, you need to at least be able to set aside $250 a week - $1k a month, that’s like $35 a day, every day.

If you can’t do that, then you’re going to take a whole bunch longer to get there, also, a starting bank of $5k – which isn’t all that much cash, borrow it, steal it, sell something to get it, I don’t care… ok well don’t steal it, but just get it.

So the idea is simple, take your $5k, spend the whole $5k on a site that’s making $500 a month – shouldn’t be too hard, most sites sell for 10x profit. Or buy 2 sites at $2,500 each, either way, spend your $5k to make $500 a month.

Next month, take your $1k you’ve saved, and acquire another site making around the $100 a month mark.

The next month, do the same again, take your $1k and buy a site making $100, BUT, you should have in the bank $1100 from the last 2 months of revenue from your existing investments.

Take that cash and buy another site, so on your 3^rd month you’re spending $2k on sites, not the monthly $1k.

Next month, same again, buy a site with your $1k. By this month you should be making $900 a month from your investments, and the end of this month you should have had $800 from last month, so next month you will have $1,700 in the bank to spend.

So next month pony up some more dough and drop your $1k + your investment revenue, with some luck you should have some growth by now in the sites if you’re working on them (which you should be), so this month – month 5, drop $3k on new sites.

This will leave you now making $1,200 a month in revenue. I think you get the picture now.

So in a little over a year, you should be sitting on $4k a month. With some luck, if you are working on the sites during the time you should be able to build more revenue by increasing the traffic, try and acquire sites that complement each other so your overall traffic can grow.

By the end of all this you might have over 15 sites easy, but, along the way there’s always the option to sell some of them or consolidate them down to less, just as long as the revenue isn’t effected.

A good strategy might be to pick 2-3 niches, pick up a forum for each that has users and traffic already, and work on picking up sites that would be relevant to those forums so you can leverage the sites to drive more traffic to the forums – thus building more members and more returning visitors, and in turn hopefully more revenue along the way.

OK, so unless you’ve not read my last post, I’ve sold my last fulltime business, and now I’m starting the planning of my next ventures.

Since I’m debt free, have been for 10 years, the cash isn’t going to pay loans, it’s just cash to invest, so with this extra cash I’m going to do some things that I enjoy.

The internet is my life almost, so I’m going to get away from it more but I’m also going to get back into web properties and web business, I think I’ll start by buying some dot coms that have profits of the $1k a month and up mark, and delegate the operations and management of them to a new staff person I’ll take on.

I have the advantage of being in Thailand, so a fulltime ‘web guy’ will set me back about $380US a month, I’ll track him using things like rescuetime.com, and I’ll check the sites and what not to make sure things are running smooth still from time to time. I’ll try to pick up a few sites that interest me, all with revenue and hopefully revenue of about $1k a month and up, usually sites like this sell for 10x profits, so $10k for 1, and I’ll try to pick up 3-4 of them, it’ll take some time because I’d prefer some quality sites, not random proxy sites or short term duds.

I’ll probably spend some time working on the sites and working on a plan to build them up more, some marketing plans and future development plans, see if we can grow the traffic and revenue, and then in 6-12 months maybe sell them? Maybe keep them, who knows, just have some fun trying to grow them and see where it goes from there, it all really depends on what sites I can pick up.

And for offline business… well that’s a whole post on its own…

Ok, so my promise to keep posting after I returned from Australia hasn’t happened…

Mostly because my trip to Australia was in part to bring a separate deal to fruition – and that deal was to sell my development company, which finally has happened J

So, while I’m no longer a owner of that business, I’m under obligation to work with it for a few more months until it’s all settled and then I’m off to my next big venture(s)…

My development company wasn’t strictly a web business – we built and ran dot coms, we were an offline business I felt, we sold development services to other businesses and most of those sales were generated offline (90% were).

My other current businesses are a mixture of offline and online, I have a couple of online stores that also distribute our custom products internationally, and I have a sushi train restaurant in town, so it’s a little diverse – which is great.

Right now the biggest things in my mind is what should I do with the other businesses, keep them going or sell them off too, and what will I do next?

Well the other businesses I think I’ll keep, they are doing fine and they are a nice source of additional revenue.

As for what to do next, I have a million and one ideas so it’s a matter of choosing the best one I guess.

Not even the best one, I think I might do something that makes me happy, something I enjoy.