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Welcome to clan tools. This is a resource full of many various things you may need to either start or upgrade your clan. Of course you need members but in this resource guide we are going to focus on the tools necessary to secure a clan for long term success. In this guide you will find links to many great tools so you wont have to scour the internet trying to find it all. How to make a clan! Clan Tools Basics
A good stable clan built for long term life needs a few basic things to survive. You need a name, domain, website, message board. Eventually you will need to look into a game server depending on the games you pursue and a Voice Communications system.
Owning your Domain The important part to pay attention to is called Name Servers. In the domain control panel there is a name server section where you fill in two nameserver choices. You obtain this information from whoever you purchase hosting from. If they dont give you this, be sure to ask them what the two nameservers are so that you can connect your domain to this new servers. Free Domain There is another option to buying a domain. You can sign up for a free one. However anything free has strings attached. You can expect advertising to be on your site. There is no way around it when its free. For example you have a www.angelfire.com/whatever/whatever.htm and then you decide you don't like the host and get a free website and www.freewebsites.com/whatever/whatever.htm you simply change the redirect of the domain to point to the new URL and you don't have to update your members with a new address. Just keep in mind, you will get advertising on your site from the free domain.
Ok now you have your full domain or the free domain and you are ready to get a website up. You need a place to host it. Free Hosting There is one possible way to do all this for free. Obtain some free hosting somewhere, use the cjb.net to get a free domain name and then sign up for ezboard or proboards for free. This would be possible and cost you $0. I will warn you that your going to end up with advertising if you chose this path. Paid Hosting If you chose to explore your options or search yahoo or google for cheap hosting, just keep a few things in mind. Don't get the $2 a month hosting, you will regret it. Generally $6-10 a month is reasonable. Also don't buy into that unlimited bandwidth or resources because thats simply not true. There is a limit to everything, they are just using that as a sales tactic to lure in more people. Truth is if you use to many resources on the computer to slow it down, or use to much bandwidth in the big picture they will shut you down. So you might as well just go by the limits provided by most hosting companies. Benefit of Paid hosting packages is you usually get a Web Panal like Plesk or CPanel. These panels allow you to manage your FTP accounts, create and manage email connected with your domain, Mysql Databases, Statistics and more. I highly recommend Linux hosting over Windows. Most boards, scripts and such run better on Linux and are generally easier to install and manage. Windows hosts tend bring about bugs in scripts and boards that you will not want to deal with. However if you plan on making an ASP website with an ASP board and such, then of course your choice should be Windows since Linux doesnt handle ASP generally. Dedicated Servers When you get to a point where your host is emailing you saying, your going over limit and you have already upgraded to the highest possibly package they have, that's when you know its time for dedicated servers. Dedicated servers are expensive, but if your just starting to get to the point of a Ded server, you wont need the most powerful one. You can probably get away with a 1.7 - 2.4 server. When you get hundreds of members and end up needing your Website, a Game and Voice Communications all on one box, thats when you want to start looking at top of the line servers, 3.2 HT Technology or even Dual Xeon Servers. Plan to spend alot more per month on this, but if your already spending alot per month between your website, game server and voice, you might as well combine them. You need to do some research on your game first before you buy. Most game servers run off Linux, however there are a few out there that require only windows. So before you go secure a Dedicated server, be sure what you need or otherwise it could cost you extra money to back out of a host and get into a different box. Managed Dedicated Servers This means the company providing the Dedicated server has tech support available to you and many times they will make alterations and help you with problems on your server. You can expect to pay alot because your also paying for the tech support. Unmanaged Dedicated Servers This means you have no tech support. The company basically gives you access to a Dedicated server with no help. You are responsible for everything that happens on it. You are on your own for configuing, tweaking, dealing with problems. The company will only hardboot or reformat/reinstall the system for you at best. You have the domain sorted and you have a web host. Now you need to build your site. There are a few tools to help you along the way. If your new to HTML/XHTML you can usually learn as you go with some of the most powerful web editors. If you go for the free editors, you more than likely are going to need to learn some HTML basics. Web Editors Macromedia Dreamweaver $399 #1 Web Editor on the market. Free editors Your not going to find to many good free ones. CoffeeCup Freeware Version Learn HTML/XHTML/CSS Even if you use the best editors, your eventually going to have to start learning some of the basic code. Content Managers Content Managers are portal like programs that create your site pages for you. All you do is fill in the information and select what type of info shows where in a website. You will need mysql access to run these. This is the alternative to building your own website. These are basicaly out of box websites in a formal design. They all do allow you to customize them for your colors and such. All of these include a forum build in or as an addon download. So you can either use the built in Board or disable it and run one of the other forums mentioned above. Graphics Programs You also are going to need a graphics program to create logos and skins for your site. Adobe Photoshop $599 Top of the line web/print driven. Free Graphics Programs Finding free graphics programs are even harder to find than the other types of programs you will need. MS Paint This is loaded with windows. Located in your All Programs/Accessories/
This is a key component to communication within your clan. Members need to be able to talk to the other members even when they are not in game. It also helps for your clan to organize itself and build the visions you members desire. Deciding on a Message Board There are 3 aspects of boards to think about. 2 out of 3 require you know a little bit about how mysql database works. Professional Boards Benefits of these boards are high quality customer support and you can expect these companies to release upgrades and patches more frequently to resolve bugs and exploits as well add more great features. The free boards wont be so quick and tend to be very slow in newer versions. The best part is the customer support, because if you have a problem, these companies will be right there to help you within the same day. Vbulletin $160 then $30 a year to renew. #1 in product and customer support. Free Message Boards Pre-Hosted Message Boards Pre-hosted means you don't need a Host. The company hosts the board for you. Less hassle. These companies offer free boards, however you will get advertising's. They also offer paid subscriptions so you can pay a small amount each month or whatever terms and you get no advertising's. This can be useful for someone who doesn't want to hassle with hosting, php and mysql. Message Board Modifications and Plugins (Advanced Users) Mods and plugins are extra 3rd party developed things that have been created for message boards. They can be almost anything that you can install to your board to further enhance and add additional features beyond what the original default board provides. Most mods/plugins come with easy instructions. You will have to open up the boards code pages and add or replace existing code. Usually mod makers give instructions such as, find this and add this under, or find this and replace with this. Most Mods are free. Vbulletin Mods Depending on the games your clan is involved with, you may need a dedicated game server. Generally First Person Shooter games such as Counter Strike, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Halo PC. Usually you can just search for public servers to play on, however if you intent to practice working as a team, or practice for matching against other clans, you need a place to go and do that. You need a private dedicated game server. In some cases clans will just get public servers as well to boost recruiting. A clan with a dedicated game server is more attracting to people looking to join clans. Private servers means you have to enter a password to join the server. This makes practices private so that other clans cant join in and see what your doing. Public servers can be used for practice also, however you will always end up with stragglers coming in to play with you. However its great for recruiting. Gamersphere does off a limited amount of dedicated gaming servers, however currently Gamersphere only deals with large account servers, when clans want multiple games on there own private dedicated server. However your looking at $160 or more a month to own the box. The most common option is to rent a game server from a company who is probably running multiples on one server PC. This is the only way to get lower rates. Figure spending $35-85 a month depending on the game and number of slots you need. Here is some suggestions of places that have a good reputation. greatlakegaming.net jolt.co.uk Another option that clans take is they end up supporting more than one game, end up having 2-3 game servers and want to save some money. Depending on the games, you sometimes can just get a Dedicated Server for $125-$165 a month and put all your games on one box. This lowers your costs quite a bit. Voice has been a revolutionary new tool for clans in the last 3 years. Many clans find it easier to team in games, play matches, scrims. You can almost guarantee any clan playing in CAL, TWL or OGL is using some sort of Voice Communication system to coordinate the win. There is two major players in the Voice Communication. Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Both allow a group of people to talk to one another. How it works is similar to an IRC channel, where you have a bunch of people in one room and everyone can talk and hear everyone. In order to use a Voice system, it has to be hosted somewhere. So unless you have a Dedicated Web Server, you are going to have to rent these systems from someone else. Currently Gamersphere offers very affordable Teamspeak packages that are extremely competitive with anyone out there selling it. Scripts are basically web applications. You might have a need for various tools not built into boards and content managers. You might need a web based file uploader, downloader, file manager, something to keep track of data, Ad manager, counters, timers, polls, news publishing, email systems, guestbooks, link managers, ect. Here are some places you can find advanced scripts in PHP, Java, ASP, Perl/CGI, Flash, C+. hotscripts.com
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