Any good ideas for hosting a personal gamedev site?
I feel a bit guilty posting this in the compo blog, but I think this is a legitimate inquiry that might be of help to others besides myself.
Here’s the deal:
I want to set up a personal website as a permanent portal for my game development news and any games I write. To this point I’ve been using dropbox to host files and linking them from my tumblr blog. I’d like to find a solution that allows more flexibility than tumblr in site layout but still supports a blog format. Being a game development site I would need to be able to support hosting my projects and ideally I would like to have support for embedded flash content since my recent experimentation with flixel. Another want is the ability to write completely custom html and css, while php would be a bonus.
I’m interested in what solutions other developers (like you) are using. What has worked for you? What hasn’t? I’ve experimented with Google Sites, WordPress, and some other options but I haven’t found anything to really fit the bill. So what do you use? Are you happy with it? Would you recommend it as a solution?
I trust LD community and its varied experience can provide some good input on this topic, just as I am sure there are others in the community with the same question I have. Thank you.
P.S. This would be an excellent question for an LD forum if there was one…
You could pretty much use any web-hosting provider that’s out there to host your own files and PHP site.
I run my own site on the Amazon EC2 cloud.
It’s pricier, but it lets me run custom software on it (e.g. a repository)
Personnally, I’m going to buy some server space and host a website on it. That’s what I think brings the most freedom, but you’ll have to look about the blog thing though…
We’ve been using a HostGator shared hosting account to run the Ludum Dare site for the past few years. $10 a month. Gives you 25 simultaneous threads, or about 24 simultaneous users. Each user request takes only a fraction of a second, so in practice it handles more than 24 people at once… alot more! That’s why the site tends to cut out right at the start time (the “alot more” part pushed to its limits).
The best approach if you want freedom is to get a web-host and a domain, and build the site yourself using PHP/HTML/CSS, PHP a simple scripting language and very easy to learn with lots of documentation out there, blog systems are easy to create from scratch using PHP and MySQL, and you can get some MySQL databases to store the data from most hosting providers along with your site hosting plan. The provider I personally use is GoDaddy, I don’t know where they rank but they do just fine for me.
I can’t recommend DreamHost enough.
With 1-click installations and loads of features.
Plus, really nice people…
I just signed up for DreamHost as they have a $10 for a year Cinco-de-Mayo deal plus your recommendation. Looks expensive apart from the deal but we’ll see how it goes. Thanks!