Web hosting for gaming communities — a complete guide

A community that lives only on Discord has conversation and no address. The invite expires, the rules sit in a thread from eight months ago, and anyone who arrives from search finds nothing they can read in peace. Web hosting for gaming communities is the stable place behind that: recruitment pages, a calendar, panels, and an address officers control.

In this guide, Battlehorns is hosting for guilds, clans, and esports teams. It is not the metal band of the same name, and it is not a game server. What you get is web space. Free-plan detail is in free guild hosting. The choice between that model and a builder is in dedicated hosting versus builders.

What communities actually ask for

Officers say "we need a website". Under that sentence is a short list, and that list is what the hosting has to carry.

• Recruitment that does not depend on a pinned chat message. Requirements, hours, and a form.
• Rules with a URL. People read them before the first voice chat, not after a ban.
• A calendar of raids, scrims, or practice. The site can show the summary; attendance detail belongs in GuildOps.
• HTTPS, a page that reads on a phone, and one official Discord link.
• A database if you store applications, news, or a simple member area. Without one, everything is a static file.

What almost no small guild needs in month one: a forum with twenty boards, a shop, an illustrated wiki, and a 4K gallery. That eats disk and traffic and then sits abandoned. The site that works is the one someone can update on a Sunday night in under half an hour.

Web hosting is also not the game server, voice, or anti-cheat. An FPS clan still plays somewhere else. The site explains how to join, which rules apply, and where Discord is. Mixing those jobs is how you burn the quota on video that belonged on another platform.

A sensible stack

• Current PHP for forms and pages that change without republishing all the HTML. Battlehorns provisioning defaults to PHP 8.3. Code that still calls mysql_connect will not run: use PDO or mysqli with prepared statements.
• MariaDB, one database on the free plan, compatible with tutorials that still say MySQL. phpMyAdmin in the client area is where you create tables and export a dump.
• SSD with a known quota. On the reference free plan that is 700 MB for files and the database. Text weighs nothing; full-screen PNGs do not.
• SSL (Let's Encrypt on the subdomain) so the padlock is there and forms do not open over plain HTTP.
• FTP with one user, a public_html folder, and an editor on your PC. You do not need a block builder to publish an index.html.

A member panel, a forum, and a blog are not preinstalled. You either write them in PHP, or you keep the site as a poster and leave members, events, loot, and resources in GuildOps. Both are valid. Installing a heavy forum "because every guild has one" on a 700 MB disk is not.

Publishing files is covered in the setup tutorial and in HTML, PHP, and FTP.

Free and paid

The free plan is for launch: a your-guild.battlehorns.net subdomain, PHP, one database, one FTP user, a certificate, 700 MB, and 5 GB of traffic a month, with ticket support. Those figures are the order flow when no other active plan replaces them. If the shared hosting page shows different numbers on the day you order, those count. The terms say the free plan has quotas and is not a permanent guarantee.

Move to a paid shared plan when you need more disk, more traffic, or your own domain. Do not jump to a game server, and do not count on ordering a VPS from the menu: that item is not an orderable product right now. The natural step up is the same hosting, with more quota, taking the files and a dump with you.

A multi-megabyte home page with background video burns through 5 GB quickly. A recruitment page of a few hundred kilobytes survives a small guild's month. Measure the weight before you submit the address to a directory.

Security and backups

• Open the site over https://. Images still loaded over http:// break the padlock.
• One long password just for FTP. Change it when someone with access leaves the team.
• The database password stays out of public Git and out of Discord.
• Update whatever you install. An abandoned forum on old PHP is the door, not the page.
• Export the database in phpMyAdmin before experiments. The terms leave backups with you unless stated otherwise. The free plan does not include a magic copy.
• Do not leave backup.zip inside public_html. It counts toward the quota and can be downloaded.

Availability: Battlehorns aims to keep the service up and does not promise enterprise-contract uptime. Maintenance and incidents happen. The channel for the account, subdomain, FTP, and certificate is a ticket, with the subdomain name and a screenshot.

Use cases: MMO and esports

MMO guild. The public page states faction or realm, raid days, and what happens if you miss. Three sentences of loot policy are enough for an applicant; this week's loot sheet should not be hand-edited HTML. Who showed up, which event ran, and which resource left is GuildOps work. The site points members there, and points outsiders at the form.

Esports team. Visitors want proof: tier, scrim hours, one recent result, and how to ask for a trial. An empty slider does not do that. A page with the team name, the game, and the next practice block does. Victory screenshots, yes, exported at 1600 px, not the original PNG from the game client.

FPS clan. Conduct and rank rules are the content. The site does not host the game server. It explains where that server is announced, and it filters applications before you hand out the role. That page is designed in recruitment and the member panel.

What Battlehorns offers

In short, the hosting gives you a subdomain, PHP, MariaDB, SSL, and SSD for the site you publish, with no ad network on top of the files. It does not give you a guild theme builder. If you need a forum and a roster tonight and nobody will touch HTML, a builder can be the more honest choice. That comparison is in Battlehorns, Guildtag, Shivtr, and Guildwork.

If hosting is your model, start at register with Discord and order on shared hosting. People who recommend the service to another community can use the affiliate program. It does not change the free quota.

In this series: free guild hosting, hosting or a builder, this hosting guide, GuildOps, the setup tutorial, the platform comparison, and recruitment that converts.