Buying a domain to showcase your games

[Jadegames]

Hi,

I would have finished my first game, Greedy Panda, by the end of next month by the latest, and like many other HTML5 devs, I wanted to get a personal website and host them. I've currently got beta versions of my game hosted on a 000.webhost.com page, for testing mostly, but if I am serious about HTML5 development, I should have a single page where I can blog, display my games etc. 

Problem is I've never done this kind of thing before.

The most obvious ones to use seem to be buying a domain and hosting space all in one go like with Wordpress or SquareSpace but I wanted to know if there is anything I should know or any better alternatives. Or even if having a website at this stage isn't required, I suppose I could just send a tinyurl link to my game, or is that less professional?

Any ideas?

[pheaset]

On 10/23/2016 at 10:42 AM, Jadegames said:

Hi,

I would have finished my first game, Greedy Panda, by the end of next month by the latest, and like many other HTML5 devs, I wanted to get a personal website and host them. I've currently got beta versions of my game hosted on a 000.webhost.com page, for testing mostly, but if I am serious about HTML5 development, I should have a single page where I can blog, display my games etc. 

Problem is I've never done this kind of thing before.

The most obvious ones to use seem to be buying a domain and hosting space all in one go like with Wordpress or SquareSpace but I wanted to know if there is anything I should know or any better alternatives. Or even if having a website at this stage isn't required, I suppose I could just send a tinyurl link to my game, or is that less professional?

Any ideas?

Buying a domain to host your games is not a bad idea if i am honest with you. Although, I myself have started to build a personal website for the same general idea, there is other options rather than paying for hosting set-up github hosting. That is what i have done so far.I don't have my personal website on github yet but two/three of my html5 games are and they can be run perfectly by anyone with the direct link.

Let me know how you get on.

Pheaset

[NePo]

The hardest part of buying domain is to think of good name

I don't think that wordpress or squarespace is the best option to go. You should just get domain and some cheap hosting plan. You can take some pretty template and throw your game links in it. 

[Jabadoo]

I agree with NePo, theres tons of free website templates around, just google search "free css templates" and free/cheap hosting services also. Just make sure you get enough data transfer per month, you dont want to run out of it when your game becomes a hit. ;-)

[Jadegames]

Thanks for the advice! 

My first game is taking a little longer than I thought, beta testing made me change a LOT of code for better usability, so I'm probably about a week or so behind schedule.

Have you got any specific examples of cheap hosting services? @Jabadoo what do you use to host your games? Did you host your first game on your own website?

I am leaning towards getting a github site and using that. Github appears to be trusted by everything (other than 000webhosting!) and the URLs aren't horrible strings to look at. Maybe when I get a few more games released I can justify a hosted solution, (I've got a bug ridden version of Pong I initially made to teach me how to code but Pong is so 1972 )

 

 

[Jabadoo]

Hello @Jadegames,

my website is on finnish hosting service (20€/year), but i assume you don't know finnish lanquage  so i would recommend you Hostinger instead.

I made website for my friend couple years ago and used Hostinger with it. As far as i remember we had no problems with it.

Their free plan has 100GB data bandwith, 2GB disk space, PHP, MySQL etc. as expected.

I had website briefly on x10Hosting.com looong time ago, but it had some problems (don't remember exactly what).

Hope this helps.

[mattstyles]

Digitalocean will do you a perfectly usable box for $5 p/m, if your games are client-side only then all you'd need is a static hosting setup, nginx would be easiest. You have to do this yourself, I don't think they encourage pre-made box setup because its dangerous to just dive in without any knowledge but there are a load of tutorials on their site to lead you through setting this up, its extremely easy to set up a basically secure and minimal box that will be faster (and at $5, likely, cheaper) than any premade box I've seen.

If you're serious though just use the big boys, Amazon or Rackspace (or even Azure if thats your thing). You really don't need much to get going and even the big boys have very cheap introductory tiers which would get you going. The problem with pre-made setups is that you are usually paying for the image, they'll usually slap you into a shared Amazon/Rackspace instance anyway and charge you an overhead for doing so, although there are some good companies out there doing this (Linode, Vultr etc, there seem to be new ones every week). Amazon have a load of pre-made instances that would suit your needs, the usual issue with pre-mades is that they'll include a load of stuff you don't use, and thats often an undue security risk (i.e. if you aren't specifically using PHP never install it because its a bitch to get secure and it'll get hammered because there are so many insecure sites out there that if you're in to the business of being a scumbag then writing scripts that target PHP is still by-far your best way to see returns), obviously, being Amazon they have a number of security features built-in but, you get what you pay for, you want the best and you want your server to be treated as its deserves then you'll have to be prepared to pay a little more for it.

[1pixelarmy]

On 11/18/2016 at 10:57 AM, mattstyles said:

Digitalocean will do you a perfectly usable box for $5 p/m, if your games are client-side only then all you'd need is a static hosting setup, nginx would be easiest. You have to do this yourself, I don't think they encourage pre-made box setup because its dangerous to just dive in without any knowledge but there are a load of tutorials on their site to lead you through setting this up, its extremely easy to set up a basically secure and minimal box that will be faster (and at $5, likely, cheaper) than any premade box I've seen.

If you're serious though just use the big boys, Amazon or Rackspace (or even Azure if thats your thing). You really don't need much to get going and even the big boys have very cheap introductory tiers which would get you going. The problem with pre-made setups is that you are usually paying for the image, they'll usually slap you into a shared Amazon/Rackspace instance anyway and charge you an overhead for doing so, although there are some good companies out there doing this (Linode, Vultr etc, there seem to be new ones every week). Amazon have a load of pre-made instances that would suit your needs, the usual issue with pre-mades is that they'll include a load of stuff you don't use, and thats often an undue security risk (i.e. if you aren't specifically using PHP never install it because its a bitch to get secure and it'll get hammered because there are so many insecure sites out there that if you're in to the business of being a scumbag then writing scripts that target PHP is still by-far your best way to see returns), obviously, being Amazon they have a number of security features built-in but, you get what you pay for, you want the best and you want your server to be treated as its deserves then you'll have to be prepared to pay a little more for it.

Agree, I have my site hosted in DigitalOcean with a RoR+Nginx configuration and I'm pretty happy with that. It's cheap and if you're not using a lot of CPU you'll be ok with the lowest rate.

[samme]

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/estimate is about $17/yr. for static content only (all you need!)

[Jadegames]

Thanks everyone! I've gone with Hostinger as it suits my needs the most and the upkeep is not crazy expensive for someone just starting up. Hostinger seemed to have upgrade options if I wanted more out of it which is encouraging.

Website creation is no small task! Still not happy with my current website. Trying to keep it minimal and simple so it's easy to navigate, but to have all your content on...it's like writing a HTML5 game!

Thanks to everyone for there suggestions, nice to get the community best minds on the case to come up with a solution!

[getzel]

Making a profesional architecture is really complex in PHP with frameworks like Symfony and a lot of dependancies (twig, bootstrap).

Looks more difficult than making a game to me.

But a simple website is easy.