Hi there folks! I’m nearing completion of my first game and it’s time to build the business! I’ve got all the legal logistics out of the way and I’ve selected my name. My question for all of you is, what web host or even web builder do you prefer? Do you prioritize hosting a web demo or do you simply display videos of your games?
As for myself, I’d prefer a web builder option(if possible) that I could arrange a website by drag and drop, that DOES support a misc. file manager with unlimited bandwidth. I haven’t found anything of this nature as of yet. Notable sites I have checked are;
Wix,
Webs,
and circlepad.
I am willing to play with web software if need be, but cutting corners at least once would be wonderful!
So far I’ve been going with Weebly, but the pageload times seem to be kind of long, not sure how much of a problem that is. The good part is that they use cloud based hosting, so the load times wouldn’t get any longer if there was a lot of traffic on my website.
I use Webs for my personal site, but the lack of ability to edit markup directly is at best disturbing. Implementing something like node.js for some poor mans’ server features simply isn’t an option.
If you’re serious about your business, you should treat it like a serious business and avoid free drag&drop website services. It is by no means professional and it does look cheap.
Get you a real webhost service like Hostgator. It costs just a handful dollars a month. In no time, you can then install Wordpress. And for that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist. It is easy to maintain and there are dozens of professional looking themes available (paid and free).
I did a lot of searching and actually found the best of all worlds at canadianwebhosting.com. I needed a bit more advanced features as I do most of my server stuff in shell and they provided that and then some… Overall they’ve come through for me when I needed them to and have given me a lot of leeway to grow. I now have a colo server running our SVN’s and some other sites and an offsite backup server. all very affordable.
I am currently using Digital Ocean for my service. It may be a bit more than some people need, unmanaged VPS, but it provides absolute control over every aspect of the server. From there I use Aptana Studio for the development instead of a drag and drop environment, as nipoco stated WordPress is also a very viable solution as a well supported CMS.
One advice:
there is many MANY webhosting service (every teenager can create one…).
When they start their buisness they promis a lot for cheap. But most of the time, on the long run, they can handle it (bandwith and availability go down after several months ).
They come and go…leaving you with problems.
Choose an old provider with several years of existance.
I use dreamhost. They didn’t offer the best bandwidth but their are the cheapest SVN provider you can find on the net.
I can put all my art asset on it.
I use awardspace.com but it is not anywhere near drag and drop. You can install a web builder of your choice on top of it very easily if you want one. It is also very cheap(for the first year it was $1 then it jumps up to like $5/mo) while maintaining the performance they claimed.
OVH, very good quality at a very good price, can’t vouch for their cheap services (haven’t used them) but they have very good affordable dedicated servers, with 100MBs guaranteed uncapped (starts with 4 core 16 gig ram 2X2TB disk at 50€/month).
Or if you want something cheaper they have really small dedicated servers (without the professional support features) for very very cheap (only 10€/month, crappy atom processor gig of ram with 500gb disk but also 100mbps to the internet!)
I have never tried them myself, but Squarespace are supposed to be all about templates and easy customization. It’s hard to not know about them since they seem to have advertised on every podcast in existence at one point or another. Might be worth checking them out.
At the time I did a quite deep research for what was the better for me. Not sure if they’d stand it nowadays, since there are a lot of new hosts since then.
I’ve actually been trying weebly since XilenceX posted it and I’m finding it very useful. It suits 95% of my needs and for template modification, there is always the CSS editor. Not too bad. Best web builder I’ve ever seen.
My take on this is if your website matters at all to you, not only shouldn’t you be using freeby / 1$ stuff, but you shouldn’t even be using small 10$ scale stuff, get something real good with guaranteed bandwidth AND decent worldwide peering (don’t want to get that cheap local host notice your customers on the other side of the globe can’t download your 20MB exe because it’s going at 5KB/sec do you?)
I’ve been using Dreamhost for a few years but they have become our host for internal use only: svn and our company wiki/ticketing system with trac.
I switched to Google App Engine last year and have been very happy with it. It’s also free if your traffic is low (which it will be unless you win the “game lottery” which is unlikely).
I stopped using Dreamhost for our public sites because their servers come off as sluggish and overcrowded. I also enjoy Python more than PHP and dream of the day we need to scale our web servers without having to become an expert in that field.
If you still want to host your site with a more traditional hosting company, I agree that you should go with one that has been around a long time. I have had good luck with pair www.pair.com and their cheaper offering, www.pairlite.com.
When it comes to making websites, I strongly recommend that you use one of these 15 Best Free Website Builders of 2017 . I personally work with Wix as it meets my requirements to the fullest extent. Wix offers really attractive and highly customizable templates.
You should get yourself a real address and web hosting. I personally use siteground.com for the host and Wordpress for the backend. You’re going to want to create a landing page to focus traffic to your game, so I’d recommend you get a plugin like Thrive Content Builder or use a 3rd party site like Click Funnel. Don’t forget to build that social network and good luck!
If I were you, I would choose one of the website builders for business. They have all necessary features and don’t require special coding knowledge. It has to be noted, some of them offer hosting like Wix or GoDaddy. Hopefully, this information will be useful for someone!
