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I work for a small web firm that provides various web services and hosting to many clients.

Our problem is that we have lots of clients and lots of domains spread over several different servers. We also have some clients that self-host.

Keeping track of all these and the changes that occur over time is a real headache. How are you guys managing similar situations?

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    Welcome to Software Recommendations! Please note this site is about recommending software, not assets like howtos, manuals, multi-media content – and neither it is about "general IT consulting topics". So sorry, this question seems off-topic here – unless you re-phrase it accordingly to ask for "a software to keep track of …", see What is required for a question to contain "enough information"? for a helpful guide.
    – Izzy
    Jul 7, 2015 at 6:19
  • What is your budget?
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Jul 7, 2015 at 10:19
  • Does it also need to manage passwords?
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Jul 7, 2015 at 10:19
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    Does it also need to manage the source code (HTML etc) of all of our clients, and also your source graphic design files? Do you need versioning for all of these?
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Jul 7, 2015 at 10:20
  • I just want something simple. That can tell me (or anyone in our company) definitively where a client is hosted and perhaps retrieve credentials. Jul 7, 2015 at 13:53

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Given that you are a web firm, would you not be able to put together something which meets your needs specifically in a reasonable amount of time, and something that only gets used internally?

If you don't want to go down the full system development route, you could look at a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. There's loads out there, some free (SugarCRM and vTiger as examples) which can be customised either through adding custom fields which you need, or you can do development into them and build in the functionality that you need.

There's paid offerings too, such as salesforce.com, but that can get expensive quickly with add-ons, or OpenCRM; which isn't open source, despite what you might expect from the name. Full disclosure: I am a former employee of OpenCRM so my view on the system will most likely be biased. I know the latter system will work for what you need, and can be customised to have extra fields to hold the information you need (it's used internally within OpenCRM for similar purposes). This can be done by system admins or by your account manager and their team with relative ease.

Aside from the general system route, there's another less high-tech route (and massively more insecure) where you store the information in a spreadsheet which the relevant people have access too, and search the sheet when you need certain information.

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We have been using our own local instance of Taiga for about 9 months, with a huge amount of success. We have slowly replaced most every other way we had of keeping track of anything: code issues, documentation updates, server information, feature requests...

I assume that you already have some other "system", software or otherwise, for handling development work. My recommendation is to create a "project" for each client or client project, as a KanBan board. Then track incoming changes, changes in progress, and those completed; as columns on the board. Use the built-in wiki, in each project, to keep track of relevant server and domain information.

They supply a Vagrant file that you can give it a spin with, but installing your own is straightforward, if you have experience with web server environments.

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  • The Taiga link at the beginning of your answer doesn't seem to work.
    – Chillie
    Nov 1, 2016 at 14:00
  • @Chillie, here, it is http://taiga.io/. Not sure why it is not working for you because I just clicked it without any issues.
    – Kevin
    Nov 1, 2016 at 17:20
  • Ok, now it seems to be working!
    – Chillie
    Nov 1, 2016 at 18:36
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LDAP Server

LDAP is a standard for providing directory information, originally developed by the telephone industry. Used in information systems today for storing information about users, servers, and much more. Basically an online shared Address Book on steroids. So you can track your clients and/or servers.

LDAP software is common, with servers and clients available for virtually every OS or platform. For example, the Contacts app bundled with every Mac computer can serve as a client to an LDAP server.

Security is part of the design.

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You can track all your documents in Google Drive. In that way, you can easily manage all the information and log ins of your hosting to each clients you handle. You can also try using WiredContact to manage your system more convenient and secured.

WiredContact makes marketing simple.It enables you and your team(s) to access all your customer, prospect and partner information in one central location 'Through your web browser on any device, anywhere in the world'.

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