Work

For the past 3 years or so i’ve always planned on organizing my hosting accounts and domain registrations better. As things stand, i have 4 different hosting packages with 3 separate hosting companies. I also have 68 domain names registered across 5 different registrars. Chaos.

Domains

You might be wondering why i have so many domains or so many different hosting accounts and that’s a good question. The majority of my domain names are sitting idle. Most of them are decent names which i could develop but just don’t have the time to. I won’t let many of them expire though… maybe one day i’ll sit down and do something with them.

Hosting

The 4 different hosting accounts are completely unnecessary, unlike the domains which may actually be valuable / useful one day. I really only need one hosting account, but i like to have another as backup. Currently i’ve two accounts with dreamhost, one with lunarpages and one with blacknight. I’ll most likely ditch one account with dreamhost and one with lunarpages. That will leave me with a dreamhost package and a blacknight package. More than enough juice in those two to keep all my sites ticking over.

Rehousing

Although it sounds easy to just shut down accounts, it’s not. It might be easy to cancel the account and stop billing but the hard part is moving the site from one server to another. It’s just hassle and dirty work… especially if you have dozens of sites to transfer. Then you have to update domain name DNS settings to point the domain to it’s new home… if the domains are registered with multiple registrars it’s just more hassle. But it has to be done and that’s what i’ll try to do this week.

The benefits

The obvious benefit of all of this is that it’ll save me money. Less hosting accounts and fewer domains means less expense. Once the big move is all complete, all of my sites will be easier to manage and things will just be more efficient. Hopefully i’ll get this blog moved to an irish server too (at long last) which should improve speed for us irish readers – that’s been a common ‘complaint’.