By the end of the month www.icarusindie.com will begin offering space to game developers (artists, musicians, designers, programmers, ect) to showcase their work. What kinds of options would you expect from a free host? What kinds of options would you expect for a fee? I''m looking to offer 150MB of space with FTP access. File size is only limited by the amount of space available to you. Remote linking and an URL in the format username.icarusindie.com I''m thinking for a paying user, I could allow a real dot com. (e.g. www.username.com) I''m working on allowing CGI, PHP and JAVA but it doesn''t look likes it going to happen for security reasons. It''s for showcases only so HTML is all that''s really needed. I''ll have a public message board set up. I can''t think of any other reason CGI, PHP or JAVA would be needed. None of the above can be considered legally binding and is subject to change. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Ben IcarusIndie.com
[The Rabbit Hole | The Labyrinth | Programming | Gang Wars | The Wall]

That all sounds pretty good. How much are you thinking of charging for a domain?

Well speaking from experience of being a webmaster for the last 3 years I''ll give you my 2cents worth.

First off if you are offering this for free then I say that whatever you offer is completely adequate. Can''t complain over what you get for free.

150MB is considerably more than most free servers offer. Most offer between 5 and 15MB. FTP access is rare on free servers as well, most require you to upload through their own built in interface.

I don''t understand why you won''t allow CGI scripts, but for what you are offering the service for (showcasing) you are right, it''s not really a necessity. The person can use HTML and java-script for making a pretty "face" on the site and easy to navigate.

One suggestion: For those that DO pay you I think you may wish to reconsider the CGI part because they can get a lot of servers they have to pay for with comparable space very cheaply that offer/allow it.

All and all I think it''s still great what you are offering, and it''s a definite plus to the amateur game development community.

Anaton
Flying Tigers CFSG

I''m thinking I may break that down to

free:
www.icarusindie.com/username/

$5 per month
username.icarusindie.com

$10 per month
www.yourdomain.com

For the domain name, the user would have to go to register it at Doster.com ($15 a year) or whomever they''d like and then I''d help get it set up for my server which is real easy to do on the user''s side. I use Doster for my domain.

Ben

IcarusIndie.com

[The Rabbit Hole | The Labyrinth | Programming | Gang Wars | The Wall]

The problem with CGI, PHP and Java is that they don''t have to work with relative directories.

For instance I have a CGI script I use to write pending account files to a directory outside the bounds of the web server. I could just as easily point it to any drive on the server and start messing with things.

I''m sure there''s a way to keep Java, CGI and PHP from being able to read and write from anywhere on my server but I just havn''t succeeded yet in doing it.

Ben

IcarusIndie.com

[The Rabbit Hole | The Labyrinth | Programming | Gang Wars | The Wall]

Its quite simple really, if you run a Linux server file permissions do this quite well, ok so the can see the directory structure but they cant read or write anywhere but their own space if you set it up right. As for windows, welll your probaly doomed.

Does your site get alot of traffic? It could be a significant selling point if paying people can have a banner put on your site in a rotation (like the gamespy sites) and a link.

quote: Original post by KalvinB
For the domain name, the user would have to go to register it at Doster.com ($15 a year) or whomever they'd like

To make this even more affordable to your users, you could recommend godaddy.com. They only charge $7 to $9 per year (depending on how many years you sign up for). I dont use them personally yet but I do plan to transfer to them soon, and I have friends and know others who use them and they are all very satisfied.


[edited by - LordKronos on May 4, 2002 10:34:21 AM]

the speed of your connection, reliability

ewen

You can check my logs at

http://www.icarusindie.com/logs/

I have around 1GB of bandwidth per day to spare currently. Which means I could serve up my monthly usage (345,789 page views last month) twice. I did 1 million page views in March no problem and still had some bandwidth to spare.

As for reliability, I''m up virtually constantly except when (like I''ll be doing this month) I''m working on the server to add features and even then I have a secondary server to switch to during the process if I need to. The last time I had serious down time was several months ago when Qwest mistakenly cancelled my service.

Ben

IcarusIndie.com

[The Rabbit Hole | The Labyrinth | Programming | Gang Wars | The Wall]