What is a good convention for website directory structure?

Question

Do to some changes in personel at my company I have inherited the responsability over administering our web server. Unfortunately there does not seem to have been a standard convention used for setting up website directories.

I was thinking of organizing the website as follows:

D:\inet[CustomerName]\wwwroot\[WebsiteDomainName]

But I was curious if any of you had a better convention or could recommend a best practice for how website directories should be organized.

Answer 1

Generally I use

\user
\user\domain
\user\domain\logs    # Location of the webserver logs
\user\domain\public  # Publicly accessible directory

If using a dynamic website, I often put the majority of the files within subfolders under \user\domain\ outside of the public directory.

Answer 2

Honestly, use whatever works best for you. Pick a system and stick with it, document it, and make sure that everyone who would ever need to make changes is aware of it and why it is important to stick with the standard.

Edited to include our standard folder structure (for www.example.com):

[drive]:\Inetpub\wwwroot\example.com\docs

We use a 'docs' folder for the web site as some clients also have separate FTP storage space which we put into a 'storage' folder under their domain name folder.

Answer 3

I work for the county government, where some departments have multiple applications, so our structure is as follows:

D:\wwwdata\DEPTCODE\APPNAME

IIS has virtual directories configured appropriately, which allows us to give more accessible application names (such as countynetapps\eaf). Each application has an "Output" folder which is the only writable folder for the application iteself, for security purposes.

Naturally there are exceptions to various scenarios, but this setup works for nearly all of our apps.

Answer 4

I keep Inetpub as the root, and end up with something like:

D:\Inetpub\wwwroot (Default Web Site)
D:\Inetpub\exampleroot (www.example.com)
D:\Inetpub\sampleroot (www.sample.com)

If I was worried about grouping multiple sites under a user or department, I'd just add it after Inetpub.

That keeps the D:\ available for other things without co-mingling the web stuff. Also, I never like sharing the root directory (no particular reason, it just annoys me).