Okay, so it’s not spring yet, but a girl can dream can’t she? Either way, I’m cleaning house — my digital house. Not only am I getting ready to start clearing out my current server, but I’m planning to soon move sites to another. I figured “why not purge the crap at the same time?” Perhaps more importantly, I’m weeding out my unused domain names.

Why? Because I’m paying money every year to let these domain names sit around. Most were registered for previously-planned projects that I abandoned for one reason or another (usually in favor of one of my projects that are now live). Some of them are hard to part with because I really do like the domains, but when you have dozens of them, the costs really add up when there’s no return.

I let about 10 .info domains go recently. I’d registered them with the intention of setting up some more of my “quiet sites” — ones that get content, that sit and earn ad revenue, but that I don’t actually associate my name with in any way. I just didn’t have the time to set more of them up, and after a year or two, it was time to let them go.

I’m also letting AllBusinessWriting.com and AllPRWriting.com expire this month. I registered those back when I planned on branching AFW out into a network years ago. But after already running a network of writing sites, I realized the better option was to consolidate them into a larger blog rather than segmenting. And that plan has absolutely paid off. In fact, I’ve just done more consolidating by moving Writers-Guidelines.com to the AFW blog for the upcoming writer’s market directory, and I’m planning to move the Query-Free Freelancer blog here and keep the QFF website / domain specifically to promote the book.

I have PRbeat.com and Cwriter.com which will soon be up for renewal. PRbeat was going to be a press release distribution site, but in the end I didn’t feel like dealing with the editorial side of reviewing every release submitted. I’ll probably let both of those go.

Overall, it’s between 10 and 15 domains I’m releasing, which will save around $100-150 each year. It’s not that much of a cost, but then again I have a lot of others I’ll let expire later in the year. I’m also considering selling off my first content site / blog, and some secondary sites that I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with anymore. By the end of 2010 I’m hoping to narrow things down to no more than five regularly updated sites, and my income-generating “quiet sites.” No more stress of digging through too much crap on the servers, or having to deal with countless updates for sites I don’t bother with.

I didn’t even realize until recently what a mess the registrations and site hosting had become. What kind of digital clean-up or reorganization are you dealing with in the new year?