I was wondering if I could find out from someone how much their clan pays for things like webspace and games servers per month and how they sort out expenses (unless of course you have one of those lovely generous people who do the paying ;) ) because my clans about to launch into a, um, discussion about finances I think :roll:
We recently started paying for a domain name and web hosting which is costing about £24pm and some of us think this is a bit steep and that there are certainly better (freeer) options available. The major quibbles our web-site-guy had was to find a host with full php, mysql, ftp, etc. We do now (own? rent?) the http://www.downgraded.net (http://www.downgraded.net) domain and have a decent amount of space and bandwidth and emails and nice stuff to play with.
Thing is theres some feeling that paying clan subs for a website/forums seems a bit odd when they could conceivably be got for free. Okay, its ours, we get spangly stuff to play with etc, but it's feels rather steep. I've been looking into it a bit and I reckon the webhosting (where we can run our own forums etc) shouldnt be too much of a problem.
I'd be interested to know how other clans sort this sort of stuff out to get a few points of view and ideas etc.
cheers 8)
I can't speak for the DMW and what advice they may give as to how they run their clan but I have run a clan web site and server in the past so here goes.
Jolt provide fairly sound servers at about £40 a month. Theoretically someone with a good adsl line could host a CS server, but this is fraught with problems when more than a few players connect. There are plenty of other providers of CS servers, but for anything reliable you are going to be looking at the £40 mark.
Websites can be got for next to nothing. All you really need a website for is to host a forum and maybe a clan news page, 'challenge us' etc. These are never going to get a huge amount of traffic so you don't have to pay for big bandwidth. Even the free space you get with an ADSL or dial up account might do. There are sites that offer free DIY clan sites and free forums. It's all pretty basic and you might have to have banners but it costs nothing.
On the other hand you have a domain that you need hosting. So I guess that none of the above will work for you.
If you are getting domain hosting then you might as well get perl and SQL. You don't absolutely need SQL as there are a few very good forums that you can run on your web server that only need perl to work. SQL allows more powerfull and better featured forums such as this one.
Finally for a completely interactive clan site you might want to use a content management system (CMS) like postnuke. This can be run on a perl/SQL web server and provides an out of the box clan community. Unless you have a really thriving clan with a lot of people who want to contribute it may be more agro than you need running a CMS.
Importantly you do not need to pay for CMS or forum software. The best ones are open source and free (Postnuke - phpBB).
Top web hosts in the whole world are Crosswired. These marvelous folk will give you domain hosting, perl, SQL, huge bandwidth, lots of pop accounts and 20mb of space for a tenner a month. What a bargan!!!!!!! I've not used them myself but that's only because I'm too stupid to know the best when I see it. (Dogmeat the usual fee to the usual account mate)
My number two, and the one I used myself, would be Clara.net for the website. Go for the SOHO account (it gives 3gb bandwidth, loads of e-mail accounts, perl and SQL) and costs a tenner a month. I have used them and they are excellent.
Use phpBB for your forum and if you want to go the whole hog Postnuke for the website. These are both free.
Rent a UK only 12 slot server from Jolt for £40. So that's £50 a month all in for clan server and web hosting. If you need to let our European cousins connect it will cost a bit more.
I'm sure you'll get a lot more quality advice. The best advise though is to shop about.
:D
cheers - methinks a little restructuring is required :roll:
We use a server from 4u, www.4u-servers.co.uk (http://www.4u-servers.co.uk) and i'd highly recommend it m8, they even give you discount if you pay for 6 months in advance, never had anyone complain about it when we've played there. If you'd like to try it out i'm sure we'd be more than happy to let you borrow it for a couple of nights, full rcon admin mod etc etc. So long as it doesn't coincide with any matches we have. Let us know.
-eBAD- Clan Server | //www.clan-eBAD.co.uk | #clan-eBAD| 195.20.108.16:27035.
should i go and make a challenge against -ebad-????
the we can give jb a kickin.
Quoteshould i go and make a challenge against -ebad-????
the we can give jb a kickin.
Nah ... we do that every night anyway ;)
You're right Sheepy. There would be a kickin' involved ... :(
/me slips oldie a fiver for some 'accidental' TK'ing. :wink:
thanks for the info guys. :lol: