Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

I wonder what ISPs those people are using. Most of the ones I've seen have some restriction in their terms of service that prohibit using the service as a hosting site. I guess it would be a good way to get started, though.

Well Thoul if it ever came down to it, I'd gladly donate/pay a service fee to help keep this site up and running.

I used to have two sites hosted on Classicgaming.com (including the Complete Guide to Phantasy Star III). At the time it was an economic decision. They were both sites attached to my personal domain which had a 10mb (yes, that's an 'm') limit at the time. It cost me about $15 a month for that tiny amount of space and to get something larger started creeping towards 3 digits.

The economics have changed quite a bit in the 10 years since then. For only $4.95 a month you can get a hosting plan that offers considerably more than a GameSpy hosted site. Here's the one I use now for example: http://www.lunarpages.com/basic-hosting/. The best hosted sites already left Classicgaming/GameSpy because hosting is so incredibly cheap now. I suspect in another 10 years I'll look back at my current hosting plan and laugh at it like I do the one I had in 1999.

Now of course if hosting is that cheap then why would GameSpy need to shut down their service? I have to imagine it's because it's costing them way more than $4.95 a month per site. They aren't structured like a dedicated hosting company so their expenses per site could be double or triple that. Multiply times the number of hosted sites and I wouldn't be surprised to hear they're losing at least $10K per month on it.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about the good sites being lost - the ones still being updated will move on to a cheap hosting plan. If a site hasn't been updated in a couple years then you'll want to back it up

I am grateful to Classicgaming/GameSpy for hosting my sites years ago. If they weren't around I probably would have scrapped them both. Some other great gaming sites, like The Mushroom Kingdom, probably wouldn't be around if it wasn't for their free hosting. We owe them thanks for all the great sites that got their start there but times have changed so we bid it a fond farewell

Well said, hugues. Hosting costs have definitely changed dramatically. I remember when I started out that 2 or even 5 mb seemed like a lot. Now Fringes has topped 100 mb. If hosting hadn't gone down so much, I'd never be able to have such an extensive site.

Darkil wrote:Well Thoul if it ever came down to it, I'd gladly donate/pay a service fee to help keep this site up and running.

Thanks! But, let's hope it never comes down to that. Hopefully the ads will generate enough clicks to pay for the site's costs. I wouldn't have them at all if not for that.