• Organizing Your Hard Drive And Server

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting | Tags:

    We have probably all done it at some point, we get in such a hurry to upload our new site that we have just spent the last 20 minutes building that we don’t think about maintaining the site at a future date or, worse still, we need to change a site we built 6-8 months ago and can not remember where we uploaded it to.

    By organizing your server from day one of your steps into becoming a webmaster you will, inevitably, save yourselves a lot of time in the long term future of our business model.

    Lets take a look at how we can accomplish this ‘organization’ though.

    On your hard drive you need to have a ‘central’ location for all of your online files and folders, what better place to keep this than in a folder named ‘Online’ of course, this is just an example but it will son become apparent to you that this is probably the most logical folder name to use.

    Now, within this folder you are also going to need to have a few sub folders, i would suggest using a folder for each of the domains that you own so for example, for your first domain, you would name it myfirstdomain.com, your second would be named myseconddomain.com etc.

    Within these domain folders you will also need to have a selection of sub folders again, I would suggest names for these folders such as /html/, /scripts/, /articles/, you are now well on the way to organizing your server.

    In addition to these sub folders you will also need to create sub folders for your images that you will be using on your sites, I would suggest using the names /banners/ and of course, /images/ for these two folders, you now know that the /banners/ folder contains all of the buttons and banners you will use on your sites and the /images/ folder contains all of the .jpg and .gifs you will use. Inside the /images/ folder, it might also be advisable to create a sub folder called /thumbnails/ which, you can store your thumb nailed pictures in if required.

    One other advantage to organizing your folders and sites in this manner is that over time, it will assist you when it comes to dealing with hot linkers. Instead of having to find the paths to all of your individual image directory, you know instantly where you put them, without the need of logging onto your server.

    Ok so you now have a semi-organized folder structure on your HD, so far we hopefully have a folder structure that looks somewhat like this:

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Images/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Images/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Images/

    So, hypothetically, if you created a article called ‘Article One’ you would find this in the following place on your HD:

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

    See how easy that was to find on your hard drive?

    Of course, on your server the folder structure will be no different so, your structure will be mirrored EXACTLY from your HD to your SERVER I.E.:

    /usr/www/sites/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

    Not only will you make your server layout a lot easier to navigate but, it should, in theory, save you time when submitting your sites to the search engines, free for all’s etc as, in your head, you will already know the location to any single page.

    Try this as an example…

    You have created an article site called ‘Online Marketing’ on your third domain, where is it located?

    That’s right, you will find it at http://www.mythirddomain.com/articles/onlinemarketing.html

    How much time would you have usually spent logging into your server trying to find this page?

    One other MAJOR advantage to keeping your server and HD structure the same is backing up your data now becomes easy as pie. you simply have to download your folders into the /online/ directory on your HD, then simply burn that entire directory to Cdrom.

    Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how proper organization can be of use to you on your HD and on your server. If you are just starting out in the adult industry hopefully you will see that spending a little time to make a structuring system such as this can save you a lot of time long term.

    One last question for you however, where would you find your article called ‘Marketing Shoes’ on your 56th domain name?

    Article written by Lee