[VPS SERVER] Is There A Faster Way To Find Out Which Sites Are Inactive?

5 replies
I hope this is the right place to ask this question, as I don't think it's suited to be in the Main Discussion Forum and leans more to a technical question.

I have a VPS server that I've been subscribed to for 5 years and counting. When I first bought the subscription it was with the intention of hosting my then customers' resell rights websites. Plus I also have some of my own websites.

Now that it's been years already and I had moved to both Dedicated Server and other file storages, I want to cancel the VPS subscription.

However 100s of hosting accounts are on it - I did a quick random searches on a few domains and (no surprises) they are expired.

What I want to know though: is there a faster way to find out whether ALL of the hosting account's domain names have expired on my VPS?

Because it's been 5 years and if all the domain names are expired I should as well cancel the VPS. And if there's a few left, I'll arrange to my customers sites to my Dedicated Server - which is of course better than VPS.

If anyone has done this before, I appreciate your advice on going about doing this - hopefully not the manual way!

Thanks in advance,

Edmund
#faster #find #inactive #server #sites #vps
  • Profile picture of the author boyrev
    look in /var/log/httpd and see if any log files are greater than 0 bytes

    alternatively, if you have a list of the domains, I could write a simple shellscript to find where the domains are pointing to. You could possibly find all your domains in the server configuration file /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf
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  • Profile picture of the author Valdor Kiebach
    There are a few php scripts about that will do a bulk check on domain availability so maybe try one of those.

    I found one that reads the list of domains from a txt file and just reports if the domain is available or not.

    The script is over complicated and out dated with deprecated functions but I am reworking it to be up to date and strip out the unnecessary code.

    If you cant find a solution yourself then get in touch and I will pass this on to you.
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  • Profile picture of the author EdmundLoh
    I already got someone to review each of the hosting accounts manually and she is half way through. Fortunately this is a one-off work but I will review the solutions here again if it ever happens again (which I hope not!)

    Edmund
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  • Profile picture of the author Valdor Kiebach
    If you need a double check then the script I fixed just reads the domains from a txt file and checks them reporting available or registered.
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  • Profile picture of the author jeffatrackaid
    A few years ago, I had to do this a few times for large hosting providers (1000's of accounts).

    Here's the process we used:

    1. Compile list of domain names.
    2. Check registration status via whois. (There are many scripts out there).
    3. For active domains, check if DNS records point to the server.
    4. For DNS pointing to the server, check apache/mail logs for activity
    5. For sites with activity, email owners about changes.

    This works pretty well with few misses.
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