You need some kind of server database no matter what your naming scheme. This is why I say hostnames really aren't as important as people pretend they are. Sor

You need some kind of server database no matter what your naming scheme. This is why I say hostnames really aren't as important as people pretend they are. Sorting hostnames as strings tends to not be as useful/common as it seems, in my experience. In your DB you can sort based on the parsed numeric version. I've just come to dislike varying padding (01 vs 001 on some servers) or breaking the padding (001 becoming 1234). But, as I said, it's all mostly personal preference.