Registrars, hosts, affiliates... how do you keep it all straight?

I'm at the point in my tiny online entrepreneurship where I'm beginning to branch out and consider different options. Like multiple registrars, multiple hosts, multiple affiliates. I've read about it here and at other forums, and after dabbling just a tiny bit, I gotta admit... there's a lot to keep track of!

So can anyone give some tips on keeping it all together? Any sites or programs or methodologies that make managing 12-14 different providers and affiliates and hundreds of link trades at a time? I've been tracking numbers in Excel and passwords and such in Word but I'm having trouble working out a system that works

 

It's called the human brain

I just remember everything...

 

I really REALLY like to keep everything in just a few spots. All my domains at one site. All my hosting at one. And all my affiliates at another.

I currently use:
shareasale.com
hytekhostig.com
godaddy.com

Ask yourself what your time is worth? You may save some money using different sites, but how much extra time is it going to take you to write everything down and keep track of it all?

 

I was actually trying to keep things together under one company as well, but some things have made me think I'd be better of not doing so:

1) Various sources indicate that having multiple IPs for your own sites helps in SEO and linkbuilding within your own network. The only real way to have multiple IPs is to get hosting with multiple companies (or force your one host to give you accounts on multiple IPs).

2) Some of the same sources and several others (like this one I just found Sunday: http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/2006/11/competitive_web.html ) indicate that Google WANTS to penalize people who create multiple websites for the purpose of building networks. It's already been proven that Google's PR algorithm looks at domain name registrant information, so what's to stop them from using that info against us?

3) Outside of SEO/link building, I'm interested in having multiple hosts to build redundancy... the last 4 hosts I've been with (including my current one) have terrible server problems which either shut down the server or slow it to a crawl. What I'm trying to do is find at least one other host where I can host all my sites (on both hosts), have half live on each host, and if one host goes down, I can redirect to the other host. Make sense?

 

Makes sense, even if I dont agree with it . I guess the best thing you could do is excel or even some type of database (Access?).