I’m currently developing an open world pirate game, and was thinking that having a website with periodic updates on the game would drum up some popularity prior to its release. I tried using some of the basic, free website hosting software, such as Wix.com, GoDaddy, and Google Sites, but found that your creativity is very limited within these sites. I tried embedding SVG graphics, but most websites either don’t support direct html embeds, or in google sites case, leaves an awkward border around the graphic. I saw that some users of this forum actually have websites of their own, so I am very curious as to how you made these, and if it is economically feasible to make such a website if you don’t get much revenue.
We’re paying a hosting company. In my case I pay $14/mo for shared hosting and $20/yr for a domain through a company known as DreamHost. It’s not the most affordable option available but it’s too much work to transition right now.
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Would you say that using DreamHost is worth the investment, or are there any cheaper alternatives of similar quality that you know of?
It’s entirely up to whether you want an unmanaged website (you do everything yourself) or you want a managed website (the company offers a small selection of software you can customize). I started off with an unmanaged service because I didn’t have a choice at the time.
If I were starting over today I’d choose a managed website service like Squarespace.
https://www.squarespace.com/
https://www.squarespace.com/pricing
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Since I worked for years in the web industry I know how to build a website. The problem is, I do not have the time. So I always leave it in shambles. You should seriously decide on some points before you choose:
- are you sure you can build it yourself using standard stuff? WordPress?
- are you planning to write it yourself or hire someone? doing it yourself will be time consuming or you will just skip it all the time (since English isn’t my first language I will have to hire someone to write for me, so I chose wordpress)
- if you hire someone to build it for you, I more recommend a WP host rather than a managed puzzle-site (professional builders like that more and can do more with them)
- if you want to do something quick and dirty, just buy a squarespace as @Ryiah said
Oh I have my domains at Google Domains (they are selling the business to SquareSpace next year, but I have a 5 years contract, which in theory they will have to honor).
I have my hosting on bluehost for the website and protonmail for mailing.
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I would avoid them with huge distance.
Thwy lock your page into their services and then you stuck.
I personally use over decade x10hosting, or x10premium. Been building on websites in past from scratch in php + SQL. But now since my time is limited I use WordPress and plugins.
I keep domains on separate service, to not keep all stuff in one basket.
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Yeah, this, so much this. At one point I started setting up Wordpress but even that was taking too much time, and that doesn’t even count the amount of time it takes to maintain the site because you will have to do that yourself with an unmanaged service.
Just to give you an idea of the effort involved my dad has a website hosted on my account that he used to keep busy during retirement. He would spend a few hours a day adding content, checking that Google AdSense was working properly, and make minor adjustments, but he quit because the amount of time involved meant it wasn’t even minimum wage and that was back when minimum wage was $7.25/hr. Minimum is now around $12/hr.
I always use WordPress, i can mod and customize, and the hack protection is good 
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You could host your own Wordpress site on AWS starting at $3.50 a month:
Wordpress is pretty easy to customize and makes it easy to publish content quickly.
just to note: only if you keep everything updated and pick correct plugins and themes…
otherwise WordPress sites are often easy target…
I would be afraid of aws fees…
even for that lightsail, theres small prints like:
“If you exceed your data transfer allowance, you will only get charged for data transfer OUT from a Lightsail instance…”
apparently stopping the instance also keeps some fees running, or if you pick something wrong theres added fees for extra services etc.
(compared to “regular” hosting sites, you get ‘unlimited’ traffic and even if that would exceed due to some bad actors, you wouldn’t at least get charged for it)
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Wordpress is the best one ever used in my career. Lot of customization is available and its easy to optimize as well.
In my experience it is hell to optimise, especially when you use ready made themes and plugins, and even with servers that support various caching methods (litecache, memcached, redis).
It sucks ass.
Either go a more hardcore route (modx? although it may be a bit hard to find newbie friendly resources for it these days…) or even better use something like Squarespace instead, at least it’s user friendly.
A $10 Amazon Lightsail instance (2 GB, two vCPUs, 60 GB SSD, and 3 TBs of bandwidth) + NGINX + Node.js + Astro. Setup takes less than 4 hours (if you have one hand, that is. With two hands, you can finish in less than an hour) and gives you complete control over your server and website.
I have to imagine that one hour is with the experience of being a web developer because as far as I’m aware none of that is a WYSIWYG. A web developer can save time assembling everything they need but someone who isn’t is going to spend way more time setting it up and way more time maintaining it.
Not really. I am not a web developer myself. And contrary to popular belief, it’s easy to set up these things. The documentation for these tools includes many examples, and set-up for things like NGINX is a one-time-off thing.
Yes, in my experience setting it up was the easy part too. It was maintaining the website that was the difficult part and at the end of the day all I “saved” (not that you’re really saving anything when you take into account the value of your time) by creating my own in that manner was a few dollars per month.
If someone wants to learn the process that’s one thing but in most cases it’s just not worthwhile.
Well, it depends.
Setting these things up is a one-time thing, as mentioned before. The only maintenance would be updating Node.js or NGINX (which is simply the matter of looking up commands online or asking an AI chatbot to generate them for you).
The benefit is that you get complete control over the technical and creative sides of things.
Shared hosting might be easier, but has a lot of gotchas with some providers. Website builders are literal garbage unless you’re building a simple portfolio or an online shop and don’t care about the inner workings of your website.
Also, since I am building the website for myself, and it’s for my game and for marketing/sharing updates about it, I think the time spent developing it is very well worth it.
I’m partial to https://www.vultr.com/ autohosted Wordpress page. Can get a page up in a day or two with no prior knowledge. Their hosting starts from $5/month. You’d need a proper Wordpress template or one of those website builder plugins as well as the domain name, which are additional costs. Themes can be bought here: 2024's Best Selling WordPress Themes
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If you don’t mind having to build the website yourself a paid GitHub account comes with the ability to host a static website. If you’re on a tight budget and already planning to use their services for version control it’s one way to save money.
Here’s an example of a website hosted off of it.
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Vultr is a very good provider from my experience, too. Highly recommend it.