Online gaming has gained more popularity in recent years and is bigger than ever nowadays. While coronavirus has grounded us in our homes, now is the perfect time to start a gaming website and build out your gaming server—this is the perfect opportunity to begin a gaming business. Setting up your gaming server depends on the games you wish to offer on your website.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to make an awesome gaming website and how to set up a server for other players to play on in six easy to follow steps. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to build your website and set up a gaming server for players to play on.
Table of Contents
6 Steps to set up your Gaming website and server
Step 1: Sketch out a plan for your gaming website
It is not one-size-fits-all for gaming websites. They come in an array of shapes and sizes. For instance, gaming blogs, websites for game publishers and developers, personal websites for streaming games, and game server websites to name a few. While they all vary in purpose, each type of gaming website is used for one purpose, gaming.
The first step to creating your gaming website is an idea. Ask yourself what you want the focus of your gaming website to be, and what type of content you want to produce. This is an important first step and will dictate everything about your website’s setup, including your domain’s name, but more on that later.
We cannot stress the importance of this step enough—if your website has no focus then coming up with a branded name will be difficult.
For this tutorial, we’ll focus on setting up a website for a gaming server. However, not to worry, the majority of these steps will apply to any time of gaming website.
Step 2: Choose a brandable domain and name for your website
With gaming sites, you can be a bit more creative with the names you choose for your site. Anything goes when it comes to domain names. While all of our advice on choosing a domain, name surrounds serious efforts to push your brand awareness and be memorable; with a gaming website you can have a little fun. Top gaming sites like Gematsu, Rock Paper Shotgun and Destructoid embodied the fun as opposed to being serious.
Alternatively, there are gaming websites that used more serious names to match what type of content they produce. Sites like PC Gamer and Niche Gamer come to mind. But ultimately you can name your gaming site almost anything and build a brand around that name. Just remember to be simple, unique, memorable and concise.
At this point in the game, you should already have an idea of what type of gaming site you wish to build, be that a streaming service for gamers or a blog, either way, it should help inform your choice of a name. Once you’ve chosen your name you need to check that they are available via a domain service with your host.
When it comes to choosing your TLD (top-level domain) we suggest sticking with popular ones like .com,.co.uk, .uk and .net. Once you’ve gotten your name chosen then you can register it with hosting.co.uk.
Step 3: Sign-up for a hosting plan that suits your needs and budget
This tutorial is centred around how to make a gaming website but also how to set up your multiplayer web server. Setting up a powerful server starts with a really good hosting solution. You may wish to set up a private or public server for any compatible game; this includes popular games like Minecraft and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You will need two hosting plans; one for your website and another for your gaming server.
The best hosting solution for your website is a scalable shared hosting plan that you can upgrade as you need more features. This keeps the cost of hosting your website low so you can allocate more funds to your gaming server hosting plan.
However, you want your gaming server to come with more robust server features then you should opt for VPS or dedicated hosting. VPS is a virtual private server that exists in a shared space and the features help keeps the price point low and dedicated hosting cost a bit more but you get to own the entire server. We’ll talk more about setting up a server for gaming a bit later.
Step 4: Choosing a CMS or site builder for your website
Now you need to choose the perfect content management system (CMS) for your gaming website. By this time, you’ve already had your hosting package and domain ready to go, next on the list is the platform you’ll use to build out your website.
Our recommendation out of all the CMS platforms out there is WordPress. While you may think this platform is best used for blogging, that’s not the case. WordPress is capable of running any type of website you want to build.
The beauty of WordPress is that it gives you the flexibility to create any type of gaming website you wish to have, which includes but is not limited to: blogs, a personal website sharing gaming streams, a news or magazine site for gaming and so much more. Setting up a WordPress website is made easy by the infinite number of templates or by using site builder to flesh out a website that suits your needs.
But if you’re looking for other amazing CMS to build your site you can try Joomla or Drupal as well.
Step 5: Customise your Gaming Site
Once you choose your CMS or site builder, you can get into the real fun of setting up your website. You have free reign to get to work of creating content for your website and building out your pages. Lost on where to start? There are a few pages every website should have: An About Us/Our Story page, a blog, and how it works if you wish, just to name a few. Other content you can feature include:
- Pieces on the latest gaming news in your blog
- Information/instructions on how to use your gaming server
- Gaming tutorials
- A forum for user interactions
If you choose to use WordPress there are over 50,000 free plugins in the directory that can help you add additional features to your gaming website. You can browse through and decide which ones to install for whatever purpose to satisfy your gaming audience. Installation is usually easy, but be sure to constantly download new updates and delete plugins you no longer use for security reasons.
To finishing setting up your website you can use many of the templates WordPress provides to edit and give your gaming website the look and feel you desire.
Step 6: Setup your Gaming Server
Setting up your gaming server as a novice can be a bit daunting. Not to worry. Our VPS and dedicated hosting servers come with an opt-in to a managed server where our technical support team deals with everything for you.
Setting up your server is easy to do in a few simple steps.
- Secure a server through either VPS or dedicated. We recommend using a VPS server because you get all the benefits of your virtual server with the robust power of a dedicated server but in a shared environment that keeps the price point low.
- Install dependencies required by the game you want to host, for example, Minecraft game hosting.
- Configure your server (we can help you with this part). This depends on the game you host as it may have specific configurations.
- Take your new gaming server for a test run.
- Now you can add other players and continue with the fun.
You’ve already taken the first step by securing a VPS hosting plan. The next step will depend on which game you want to host.
Conclusion
If you plan to run a multiplayer game released in the past couple of years, chances are you need to set up a private server for it. These games will provide clear instructions on how to configure the server. If you get stuck during the process, you can also ask the community for more assistance on message boards and forums or just contact technical support.
Get a hold of Hosting UK’s top-rated Game hosting and build your own gaming website today!
