Hi again
Thanks for the reply back!
I've replied inline below to each concern for you:
"I'm sure it would be possible to put up some kind of webpage that points
to those files, although i'm still not clear on how that makes it better."
So, just making a landing page of shared files for download doesn't
really constitute as a "website" per se. It'd be more like a glorified
storage location. Making an actual website intended for the purpose of
advertising the game, and having pages of where you can view image
galleries, or videos and such would make it more in line with being a
"website".
Just like any other site, you'd have a home page advertising the game and
what it's about and stuff, and subpages that'll take users to say, a
gallery of images for that game, and another page for a forum where users
can post about it and stuff. Basically, it'd be more than just a place to
download stuff.
"The problem for me is that there are over 2500 of these 'demos' that i
host for my community. I like to keep these available because players
returning after a few years often find 'demos' of their team in the archive and can
watch and re-live those moments. There isn't a common set of 'best' ones
or 'important' ones because what one person finds interesting, others
don't."
So, this sounds more like archived demos. Are these videos of some sort?
Perhaps, creating a page where the demos are viewable through the site
would be okay. But, archived data storage poses somewhat of an issue as
well in the cases where you just have stuff there that isn't actually
accessed very often, if at all. For more archived stuff, would it be an
option to manage the archive storage locally, and possible consider
services like Youtube to upload them to to link them through the site for
view in those cases where users might view it?
Having them actually viewable through the site instead of just sharing as
a storage repo would help, though.
"I do want to stay with Dreamhost, especially since i literally pre-paid
for a year of hosting an hour or two before my files were deleted - but if I
have to spend a large amount of time on 'fixing' the site, it's a lot
easier for me to just get a $5/month DigitaOcean droplet and host my own
Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP server there without any arbitrary limits on how i
present the files to my users. However, it would leave a very bad taste
in my mouth to have lost $120 USD ($160+ Canadian) paying for a hosting
service that I don't have any use for, and have to leave after 15 years
of being a happy, satisfied customer."
And, we want you to stay with us!
I know it's some work to do, but basically, the problem with how it is
now is that it's only a storage repo on a server that's not only sharing
space with the neighboring accounts hosting on it as well, but meant to
manage "websites" for hosting instead of storage repos. If you can turn
the repo into a website serving the data instead, we can look over that
and allow the usage instead.
