Thursday, February 17, 2005

Whoah - Brain Overload

I woke up this morning feeling great, and sat down to my usual morning tasks with coffee in hand. All was well for the first hour or so, until I noticed some of my databases acting up (critical error, too many connections, etc).

I grabbed a donut (chocolate covered cake) and another cup of coffee and ventured into my ThirdSphere account to check my disk space and bandwidth usage. Images of all of my accounts, all of my domains and subdomains, all of my databases, and all of my files - here, there, and everywhere - started to send me into overload and on the edge of an anxiety attack.

I was actually surprised to find that I am barely using half of my allowed disk space (500 megs), and only around 1/3 of my allowed bandwidth (30 gigs). Whew. And it turns out that the problem was temporary - whatever it was must have been on their end, and they had it fixed by the time I checked again.

While I was in there poking around, though, I jotted down a list of all of my domain names and websites. I recently added 3 domain names - one website, two yet to develop - and have 6 more that I was ready to add at any time. Let's see... oh whatever, I lose count :p

Anyway, in the process I made some decisions to help "clear my mind" with it all and do a bit of 'housekeeping'. Instead of putting the 6+ new sites on separate domains, I headed over to GoDaddy and registered one good domain that would serve all of the topics generically. Then I can use either subdomains or directory names for each of the topics, or actual sites - and can easily continue to add new sites/topics to that collection. Good solution - and I actually found a really nice domain name that included a "call to action" in it ;)

I think that makes 10 websites I will have live on the one hosting account by the end of this week - with several more domain names pending site development. Considering the accounts at ThirdSphere are only 25 bucks a month, it's really hard to beat the deal - $2-3/month for hosting on each.

Most of my sites are completely unrelated and arent linking to each other (or at least not in any way that would be deemed "spammy" by the SE's) so it doesnt pose any sort of problem for me to keep them all "under one roof". They all have their own independent linking system - getting the majority of inbound links from outside domains.

The only exception would be my blog (here), which is the major reason I havent yet moved it over to the clicknewz.com domain that I have pointed to my ThirdSphere account. It has a TBPR (toolbar pagerank) of 4, and many inbound links... and moving it just hasnt seemed like a priority with all else I have going on. I do plan to move it to the domain in the near future, but I believe I'll set that up on a completely separate host when I do - just to stay on the safe side.

All is well - I was stressing for no reason - but at least now I have everything down in front of me on this notepad and the "big picture" is beginning to come together more clearly for me. It's good sometimes to take stock of all of the things you have out there, and take a good hard look at them to determine what your priorities are.

I think maybe I'll devote half an hour to each of my projects today to finish them up, add to them, or get them rolling in the right direction. Most of it is minor work (click click click, type, done) and it will be fun to make progress on them all across the board :)