Having everything organised is important to me, and it should be for almost everyone. There’s nothing worse than having a server die, or system crash and not knowing what’s affected, not having a backup and not knowing what has to be restored.

Aside from a system restore point of view, it’s important in case a server becomes hacked or heavily loaded; it’s good to have your heavily loaded sites on servers that can handle the traffic, or at least have a location for them to move to in a short period of time if one of your sites does become busy.

I’ve spend the first 4hrs of this morning moving sites off 2 of my old dedicated servers and into new virtual server environments. My new virtual servers won’t have hardware failures and won’t need hardware upgrades, additional resources are 1 click scalable and the hardware is spread across multiple servers.

Another part of organisation I like to do with my servers is to remove any sites that are unused, or dead, I like to prune old sites off my servers, rather than letting them linger around for no real reason, I either sell or just delete and let the domain drop.

The fewer sites floating around on my servers the more focus I have on the sites that are actually worth spending time on, rather than having to maintain sites that are a waste of time.

I have a few hundred domains, but actual sites that are operational are around 40. I have designs and systems for close to 100 domains, but I don’t have the time to maintain or market the rest of them, the designs are sitting on our local server for the day when some of the current batch that are operational are shut down or sold off.

I talk about this because my friend just had server die with about 40 sites on it, took him over a week to restore all the sites on a new server, mostly because of bad backups and not knowing what was actually on that server. It was all a bit of a mess, but at least now he’s running on a dedicated virtual server that shouldn’t die anytime soon.