Setting up a website for a complete noobie

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

So I was learning HTML for a school project, and being myself I stepped on all of the other kids, and had a good CSS stylesheet, documentation, and I was also making some cool logos for it too.

Later that day I was thinking of actually making a website to host all my games and have allot of fun just learning more about web development. So I google’d some things, setup Apache, then someone on youtube told me that it could eat up my bandwidth and things could get easily hacked. (From my external IP apparently).

Knowing myself I was probably going to regret loosing the idea, so I just decided to go with it.

Is hacking an actual risk? Will it eat my bandwidth? Is there a better option?

Edit: Probably should have mentioned I have literally no budget. It has to be free, until I find a way to pay.

#2

Well it depends on how many hits you get. If you’re getting many people trying to connect to your site then it’ll certainly slow things down a bit.
I suggest just looking up some free web hosting site, it’s more simple to do that than to set up your site at your house, and there’s not as many risks.

For the security bit, you shouldn’t worry too much unless you’re going to be storing personal data or have the site hosted from your home network. There’s always the chance that somebody will crack your site, but anyone who would do it for no real purpose other than to ruin your site probably doesn’t have that much experience in the area. If you’re just hosting your games on the site, just make backups every once and a while and you’ll be fine. For anything more than that, I’d look into the common methods people use to hack websites and fix the loopholes that cause these vulnerabilities.

#3

Thanks for the advice, I think I’ll stick with a web-host. Any good free ones?

#4

Well I don’t have a ton of experience with free webhosting, there’s definitely people here that will have better suggestions than I. But check out http://www.000webhost.com/. I use them for anything I need to do non-local, and I haven’t had a problem yet.

You may want to look at this list too: http://www.dezzain.com/website-reviews/top-5-free-web-hosting-sites-with-no-ads/

Good luck :slight_smile:

#5

If you have $4 a year, you could go with http://123systems.net/. I’m planning to use them in the future, because 000webhost sometimes pops up ads on your site when it loads which can deter some visitors.

#6

If you’re happy to go with something simple there’s Github pages.

#7

You could also use something like Gamejolt or Static Void Games to host your games for you.

Gamejolt has a pretty good community going now, and I know they at least used to host Java stuff.

I’m the developer of Static Void Games, and I’m going open-source with the whole thing this summer. I’ll be looking for people who want to fiddle with the html and css of the site in the near future.

You could also host it on multiple sites (Gamejolt, Static Void Games, and your own site) if you want.