Elysian Shadows

So I am currently working on a game, and at some point I know I'm going to want a website for centralized promotion. I was wondering which website hosts the team at elysian shadows was using, and if they had to go through any hoops to get the domain name elysian shadows. anyone else is also free to chime in. (also do lawyers need to get tied up at any point in this process, like if i need to also start a llc to procure the product?)

thanks in advance for anyone who responds!

also sorry in advance if this is on an inappropriate discussion board. i wasn't sure where to put it, so since it kinda has to do with marketing the game, which is part of game development, i went with that logic and posted it here. if it's inappropriately placed, please feel free to move it elsewhere.

The website is hosted by HostGator. There weren't any hoops to jump through because the domain was available. If your game has a unique name, you shouldn't have a problem getting a .com domain. However, if it's already taken you can either settle for some other TLD (e.g. .net), or if you're really adament you and whois the domain name and find out if the owner is willing to give it up.

thanks for the reply dan; i was lucky enough to find a couple available domains. and because now i know you guys are using hostgator, im feeling biased towards that because you guys seem to be doing well with it (if there are some gotchas with host gator I should know about, please let me know). I did find one other registrar, namecheap, that seems promising. Any chance you know anything about that registrar?

gamenovice wrote:thanks for the reply dan; i was lucky enough to find a couple available domains. and because now i know you guys are using hostgator, im feeling biased towards that because you guys seem to be doing well with it (if there are some gotchas with host gator I should know about, please let me know). I did find one other registrar, namecheap, that seems promising. Any chance you know anything about that registrar?

I don't know anything about Namecheap specifically, but I was the one who recommended HostGator to Falco after a quite lot of research and comparing what's out there.

The main selling points for me on HostGator were: price, support, unlimited everything, and most importantly SSH access (I honestly don't know how anyone runs web server that they can't even SSH to).

A lot of web hosts limit e.g. the number of email account or sql databases you can create. HostGator is unlimited*, where the * is basically "you have to be running a usable website, you can't just store 30 TB of movies here for your friends", i.e., unlimited within acceptable use guidelines.

Edit: Wait, Namecheap offers hosting and domain name registration (two totally different things), so when you say registrar I'm assuming you mean registering the domain with Namecheap and pointing to your HostGator web server? That should be fine. Both of our domain names (as well as my personal domain name) are through GoDaddy. I wouldn't recommend them (they were probably the cheapest at the time). GoDaddy has gotten really big and their site is miserable to navigate. They're constantly trying to trick you into buying stuff you don't need. I'm sure there's a better registrar out there.

Also, I feel obliged to mention:

If you don't care about support, and are certain you can manage your own server, I would instead recommend:
http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/

It's by far the cheapest reliable hosting you'll find. It's $1 / month, indefinitely. They manage this by ignoring stupid support requests and only responding to serious issues (e.g. server down).

yea so far the idea is to register domains through namecheap. i don't know if I'd want to host it there though, so I'd be willing to give host gator a look. It's a new site so i dont expect serious traffic, so ill go for something that gives me the most bang for my buck. for that reason, if its initially inexpensive to host through namecheap compared to using both namecheap and hostgator, id probably do that, with the possibility of migration in mind, which luckily namecheap seems to accomadate.

since you guys are active customers for hostgator i could try to confirm this with you: I've heard in recent years that the hostgator servers seem to go down more often than before. Is this a baseless rumor, or has it actually been trending like this?

the no support one seems interesting. ill probably use it for smaller sites that i do not expect a lot of traffic to.

gamenovice wrote:since you guys are active customers for hostgator i could try to confirm this with you: I've heard in recent years that the hostgator servers seem to go down more often than before. Is this a baseless rumor, or has it actually been trending like this?

I can't log into cpanel to check official stats, but I've *never* seen elysianshadows.com go offline. You have to remember though that in the production web server world, a few seconds of downtime can seriously impact a business. If you're in need of greater than HostGator's average of 99.9% uptime (nosupportlinuxhosting claims an average of 99.99%), you shouldn't be using shared web hosting anyways.

Just for reference there are 31,536,000 seconds in a (non-leap) year. Thus, the average amount of downtime per year would be:

HostGator 99.99% uptime = 31536000s * 0.0001% downtime ~= 53 minutes of downtime per year, on average
NoSupport 99.9% uptime = 31536000s * 0.001% downtime ~= 8 hours, 50 minutes of downtime per year, on average

That's 8 more hours that customers can't access view your advertisements or order your products and services.

Again, for a big business, this matters a lot. At the company where I work, we have customers who have servers with an uptime of over 6 years! If they hosted their services on HostGator, those ~48 hours (4 days!!) of downtime probably would have put them out of business.

Thanks for the help so far dan. One more question before I commit to a decision, what hosting plan did you use with hostgator? My website will be similar in structure to the elysian shadows site, but will obviously not have as much traffic load. Ill also be using two separate domains, so ill be managing two separate websites.

gamenovice wrote:Thanks for the help so far dan. One more question before I commit to a decision, what hosting plan did you use with hostgator? My website will be similar in structure to the elysian shadows site, but will obviously not have as much traffic load. Ill also be using two separate domains, so ill be managing two separate websites.

If you need more than 1 domain, you'll have to use the Baby Plan by the looks of it: http://www.hostgator.com/shared-compare
(unless of course you want both domains to point to the same site, in which case you just forward one to the other.

They've changed their plans page since our purchase, so I don't recall which one we bought. Read the comparison chart and buy what's right for you.