VPS Architect for Hundreds of Sites? - Open Ended Question

[MrFish]

Hello W3, I've got something I'm tossing over in my head looking for different points of view. I mostly work on sites individually site-by-site but I'm working on something that I'm trying to do differently. The idea is-

• A large-scale network of sites.
• Each site has a template (choosen from a handful)
• Each site has it's own database
• These sites all have the same type of content but have different content that needs to be managed by individuals outside our system. (ex: a car sales site. clients can upload cars and manage content but can't access the files directly)

I want to figure out how to do this pretty easily. My two ideas are 1. Have a single center for all content. When a site is accessed it uses a config file for that site and dynamically pulls in all content at each page call. Each site would be a shell essentially. If you access the stylesheet.css file it would actually load like php (using mod_rewrite) and dynamically pull in the correct style. This could have complications since there wouldn't be actually be any php files. If you went to the car_search_results.php file it would send that page url to a parsing page and write the information dynamically before running it. Same with something like an about-us page. This could become complicated and lag the server too much. 2. Each site would hold their own files but any updates would need to be pushed out from the center. So if you updated the stylessheet_redtheme.css file it would push it out to every site that is configured to use that stylesheet. This would be simpler but I don't know if it would loose flexibility. Any thoughts?