That's great. I have done what you've said and i can now say I'm happily using it now.

A couple of things i did differently was this which maybe of some use to other people.

I set up my repo with trunk, branches, tags folders.

so i did this instead

svn co file:///home/#####/data/svn_repos/my-example.com/trunk .

The dot (.) just tell the system to checkout into that folder the contents

It works great.

Absolutely - the best way to do it is to repeat this process for each domain you wish to have under svn. To recap you'll:
- Create a repository for the domain name (or project name),
- Do the local checkout,
- Do the checkout to the server for that domain's folder
- Set up the post-commit hook in the new repository

Now, when you commit changes from each domain's folder, that project will get updated accordingly. This is how we use SVN, and it has worked out pretty well so far!

Once again thanks for this excellent write up.