Is this a good setup, pro's / cons?

A master.domain to store all extensions and jms.

A domain.com that will just be links which go to other subdomains or subdirectories of my site.

A profile.domain which will only use jomsocial component

A forum.domain which will host a large forum

Then there will be 3 main sections of my site. Music,Cities,Gaming
The gaming may have 50-100 sub domain or sub folder's (Games)
The music maybe a couple hundred sub's (Artists)
And cities will have almost 3,000 sub's ( Locations)

Each section will use it's own template that will be shared by that group.City Template, Gaming Template, etc. All the pages in each section will be almost identical except title and maybe a few links (Seperate forums, Jomsocial Group Page, etc). I read in another post where you can make a master slave that a group shares to replicate sites in that section easy. So could I do something like this?

Main Master > Shares to a Slave Master group > Slaves of the group share the template and extensions of the slave master. If I update the slave master it auto updates all the templates in that group.

Also in my case would it be better to do a setup of having each section a subdomain (master slave) and then subfolders for links in that section?

Gaming (subdomain)
-Game 1 (subfolder)
-Game 2 (Subfolder)


I am worried about my host not being to happy with me have 4000 subdomains even though it says unlimited. But I also want each "site" to act as its own, can a subfolder multisite still accomplish this?

The main reason I need so many sub domains is because I want to use Jomsocial Groups but have a unique menu for that group. They way it is setup if a menu is assigned to Jomsocial it will appear on a group pages. There is no way to specify a menu to a certain group. So I figure if each group has its own subdomain or subfolder then I can have it load the Group Page and the menu at the same time once that link is selected. All thanks to this wonderful software that is being offered here

One last thing, lets say I have the 4,000 subdomains. I know I setup a admin user for each domain. Username and password. Most likely this will be the same info for all subdomains. What happens if I decide to change the password do I have to login to each site and update the password?

I know this is a lot of info but I would really like to make sure I have the right plan of attack.

Thanks in Advance.....

First, I suggest that you section sites are NOT a children of the master websites and that you keep your master website in a specific DB that is not shared with the slave site.

The architecture could be
- Master
- Section 1
+--- Subdomain(s) in section 1
- Section 2
+--- Subdomain(s) in section 1
- Section 3
+--- Subdomain(s) in section 1


Or if you prefer, you could create intermediary group.
This mainly depend of the content that you want to share.

- Master
- Generic Section
+- Section 1
| +--- Subdomain(s) in section 1
+-- Section 2
| +--- Subdomain(s) in section 1
+- Section 3
+--- Subdomain(s) in section 1

See the tutorial video 0.b slide 21-24 that show an architecture.

If you are using a very large number of subdomains and that you use a VPS or dedicated server for which you have the root login, it is possible to setup the server to use dynamic subdomain recognition. In this case, you could defined a wildcard subdomain recognition in apache and let JMS do the remaining.

Under JMS 1.3, it is also possible to implement a specific "multisites_userexit" to speedup the processing and avoid building the master index and also reduce it size by hardcoded rule. Over 1,000 websites, this is recommended to avoid an impact on the performance due to reading a large number of slave sites definition. The hard-coded rule do a part of the decision performed by the "super switch".

Concerning the choice of subdomain or subdirectories, this is mainly related to search engine. The fact that you use subdomain is recognized as separated website by the search engine. If you are using subdirectories, this is the same website. This may have an impact on the referencement (ranking).