Where & how do you people store your customers websites data? Hosting control panel url, user name, password, database user name & pasword, ftp details etc...?

Hi!

I would like to know where (how) do you people keep information about your and your customer websites. I mean, each website have hosting details, ftp details, database name, database user name & passwords, domain registration details etc…?

I am building app that would store all this data in one place for you in organized manner, and I was interested to find out if there will be interest for such an app?

You will be able to add hosting details,domain details, ftp details, and in general everything that you need about your & your customer websites in one place

I am thinking about 1 digit price, that is max $9.99

Any opinion & suggestion is welcomed.

Regards, zoreli

I store mine on a onenote page.

There are quite a few things to store though depending on different sites. For instance one site may have one database and another three databases with different login details and the same goes for email addresses.

An app is no good to me as I do not use any products that can use an app!

Thinking about it security would be very important as apps tend to be on portable devices and they can be lost or stolen. So if you could encode the data that would make it more saleable?

Hi

Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify, when I say app, I mean program (software) for Mac & Win. Encoding the data is an option, as well as storing the database in cloud instead of the local system.

Regards, zoreli

Thanks for the clarification @z0reli I am not very tech savvy and associate an app with phones and tablets.

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We use multiple KeePass containers, where management has access to all of them, including employees containers, allowing any information to be updated/added/removed according to who need access.

The KeePass containers are stored in the cloud (Jottacloud more specifically, to avoid “government review”), and the key files are stored in encrypted DriveCrypt containers.

This way we have no single failure point.

While for many our approach might seem like overkill, it all depends on the size of the projects you work on. The larger projects, the more careful you need to be with this information, since a breach can cost a significant amount of dollars.

Personally we would like a more unified solution, that makes management easier. But after checking the solutions that are available, we ended up scrapping each one of them due to potential security issues.

If you create a good software, that has strong security and market it well, I am certain there is a market you can tap into with the correct advertisements. But just keep in mind that the price point also decide what market you tap into, the cheaper you sell a license, the “less good” the software actually look.

Interesting (corporate) point of view. I will review and consider the issues that you pointed out very seriously. Thanks for spending your time to reply to my post.

Hi to all again…It has been about a month after I post this, and I am seeing fairly low level of interest for this post. Does that mean that there will be also low level of interest for such a software? It takes significant effort to build this (i am in the middle of the development now), and I would like somehow to gauge the eventual interest for such software.

Can anyone give me some idea how I would “measure” the potential level of interest for this kind of software?

Regards, z0reli

personally i store all of my passwords/ftp etc on a piece of paper. Sure someone could steal my piece of paper but how likely is it that someone would know what it is or means compared with someone hacking my computer and stealing a document/file with them on. Computer hackers will know what an ftp password is compared to your average house burglar (who won’t even care about the bit of paper to start with).

It’s a nice idea but i don’t have a lot of trust when it comes to all my passwords. How do i know you aren’t going to nick them? the program could fire off my passwords periodically. If i get hacked is it a leak from the program or from somewhere i have put them. Can i sue you if you get hacked and all my sites go down? Don’t mean to be negative, i am perhaps more paranoid than the general public. Gaining trust will be your main challenge i think.

good luck

I happen to store mine in Evernote. I have a “notebook” for each client, with projects and other details under that.
A single note holds all their server-related access such as hosting company, control panel, FTP, database, IPs, nameservers, software versions and more. Typically the customer has me setup email accounts for them so I put that here too, as well as all access to the website backend itself, whether Wordpress or some other CMS.

The reason I keep all this is that I organize it and send it back to the customer so they have a detailed record of all their accounts too.

I believe it would be difficult to do this in an app, because the data is so arbitrary. If they host with one hosting company or another, I’m storing very different details. An FTP might be just a domain with user/pass, but there may be multiple accounts. Same with email, or Wordpress users. Maybe they don’t use Wordpress but some other tool? If they have Godaddy, they might have a pin number, but other companies don’t have a pin, but maybe they have question/answer challenges I need to record.

DNS data may be handled at the host, or with a DNS provider. Or maybe they use a proxy like Cloudflare.

I feel like, if this were going to be wrapped up in a software, then all the fields have to be arbitrary, but also allow grouping and subgrouping and building up custom templates. For example a “user” is not always just a username and password. Maybe it’s a username, and email, a displayname, and a password. But not all users belong under one heading, there are users for the hosting company, for FTP, for email accounts, and for the software like Wordpress. So multiple users are linked together under a single heading, but each “user” under different headings might have slightly different details.

I believe this is why if you ask this question, most people will respond by saying they type it all up in a big text box, because you can type whatever you want. There is no real standard way to store all this, and as soon as you try to develop “standard fields”, somebody will need them altered, or something added to it.

Good luck tho!

Hi zackw

Thanks for valuable insight. Actually, all those years (over 15 years experience as web developer), I was doing the same. And that was the practice in all the companies where I worked. The only difference was that I always encrypted the text file.

About the fields…I have sketched the software, how the forms will look like and which fields will be included in each form. At certain point of the development of the software, I may post a link here so you can all see how the software will going to look. (screenshots)

But you are right about one thing…I should find out how can I provide a way for user to customize the fields, or even better as you said, to eventually create its own “templates”. Personalization of the software would help software to be accepted by large number of people. Sure enough, at this time, I have no idea how can I do that, but I will try.

Once again, thanks for valuable insight.

Regards, z0reli

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