What is it with hosting companies making in impossible to retrieve your hosting settings, i recently had to re-install windows and whilst i know i should have written them down, i didnt.

Being going round and round and round and round in circle on the godaddy website, JUST GIVE ME MY SETTINGS, im so frustrated.

Same thing happened to a friend when she tried to get her hosting settings from 123-reg.

Additionally, for domain and hosting websites - they are pretty badly designed and not easy to navigate.

Is there a Web and Internet RANT section? No, there should be.

aaaaaaaaaah

I would have to tell you not to dispair as not all companies are the same. What settings are you looking for? I personally left 123-reg a few years ago for a different reason.
I know this will not help you now but for future reference I would offer 2 tips:

First of all, use a hosting company that offers cPanel. That way all the info you would usually need is your cPanel username, password and web address. You would also quickly remember the cPanel port number as 2082.

Second tip which is invaluable is to partition your hard disk next time you reinstall Windows. Then store everything important, documents, media, settings etc on D: as this acts as a completely seperate hard disk and will not be affected by future reinstalls. You can even set "My Documents" to automatically store everything there. If you have a brand name PC recovery disc the option to partition may not be abailable. If so and asuming you have Windows XP home you can get a generic copy. This would be easily available using your imagination. You can then use the COA sticker on your PC during install and activate as normal. Some drivers would probably need to be installed so get all available drivers first from the PC manufatuures website.

Hope this can be of help in the future.

I'm sort of with Sean on the cpanel thing BUT that doesn't solve your domain issues with your registrar - EG 123-reg. You'll still need a seperate login for them so be sure to make a note somewhere. Also I would highly advise you not to keep login details in a text file that anyone could open. Instead put them in a file, encrypt it and delete the original. If you're really security conscious then go one further and use stenography to hide the encrypted file inside another file (eg picture or sound file).

Also with cpanel you can access your account from /cpanel not just port 2082. The same goes for cpanel webmail at /webmail.

Consider buying an external usb hard drive too for backing up. As Sean says partitions are a good idea but they can sometimes become corrupt if you accidentally select a wrong option (and believe me from personal experience - it isn't nice when you loose 17GB!)

Keep all your passwords in an encrypted file which can be copied to a USB key etc.

http://keepass.info/

Never had an isue with a disk partition but as for external hard disks, I would not have one near me. Hard disks spinning at 7200rpm are much too fragile to store in anything other than a large, heavy metal box (computer). As a duty manager in Maplin for a time I lost count of how many external hard drives came back with that familiar clicking sound. "It just broke all by itself" Yeak right or maybe the kids or the dog knocked it over while it was on.

Since they are hosting your data, you could always include a heavily encrypted file with your details...
At least you would know where to find it. 

I keep all of mine in my head, the only safe place I can think off but I am lucky and have a good memory for things like that.

A lot of the passwords I use could not be remembered. Keepass has an option to generate passwords - here's a sample of the sort of password I use: aFMt,fmB`W$SSFD+

The advantage of KeePass is that you never have to remember or key the password, you can drag and drop it straight from KeePass to the application/browser.

If you can remember the passwords they will not be as secure as passwords generated using techniques such as entropy collection.

I've had a few partition incidents! XOSL (eXtended Operating System Loader) is a boot manager with a windows looking GUI to it. Great booter it really is but the installer can be a bit hit and miss. Several times it has destroyed partitions for me hence my advice to create a backup else where. I know the average user doesn't play with partitions but you can never backup data too many times.

With regards to external hard drives.. they can be taken apart and the drives mounted inside the PC. From the cases I've heard about with these external drives failing its normally the actual driver board inside which the HDD is connected to. Also they do indeed fail pretty quick (you said about kids etc). I've got a 500GB external here now on my desk. Less than 1 year old and every day without fail it makes a nasty clicking sound while beeping at me. It's never moved, had no jolts or knocks but sounds like its giving me some sort of warning beeps. Buffalos website mentions nothing about this so I'm now just waiting for the click of death before installing the drive into a machine in a normal manner. I certainly wouldn't pre-emptively jump to conclusions about peoples kids being responsible - external hard drives are well known for failing pretty fast.