The GDNet file manager appears to be usable today, so I can update this week's journal header.

Being unable to load up images to GDNet this week was a reminder to me that I really need to move on getting my own hosting. While the limited amount of web space here has been a great way to dab my toes in the internet stream, it seems everyone and their goldfish has their own website these days. I've been dithering about this for ages because I don't know much about running web pages, but then again, how else will I learn without giving it a go?

My main concern is that I don't know a lot about selecting a good web host. Every web host provides a plethora of features, but I'm not sure exactly which I need. I'd ask questions in the forums but I think I need help crafting the question I need to ask.

There are a few basic features I think I'll need. I really would like a place to put up a few web pages, stick up some of my games for download, start a web journal, maybe start a web comic and perhaps start some official company webpages later down the track. The ability to host multiple web sites would be needed, as eventually I'll need more than one domain. However from my understanding nearly everything should be able to cope with that.

My current inclination is to go with Dreamhost; I've read mostly good things about them, and they've got a lot of information on their website about what they provide. The main downside I've heard about them is their servers aren't quite as useful for CPU intensive operations; I'm not sure if that applies to the sorts of things I'd be using it for, unless the journal or web comic software uses a CPU hungry database system (I'm pretty clueless on how those work from the server side).

Still, I'm pretty keen on starting this up, otherwise I'll just let it slide again. I'm setting myself the deadline of choosing a host by the end of the week, as I suspect most of the well known ones are fairly reasonable. Then by the end of the month I hope to be dabbling with a website of my own - once I decide what to call it and which top-level domain to use. Dot com, dot net, dot net dot au? Maybe more than one - extra domains are fairly cheap?

Note that one of the first things I'd do is set up a new journal over on the new site, I'm not planning on closing this one. However I'll start winding the use of this back to maybe once a week or less, providing a more quality summary of game dev relating things. I'd be using my own site for the regular run-of-the-mill daily crap we all have to wade through. Frankly for this journal I suspect it will be an improvement.

Question and comments would be welcome, so I can ask a sensible question in the forums tomorrow.