World of Warcraft on the Web: Paid vs Free Web Hosting for WoW Guilds

Written by: Amber Neely • Edited by: Michele McDonough
Published Aug 13, 2010 • Related Guides: Web Hosting | Joomla | Warcraft

If you own a guild in World of Warcraft, making a guild website has probably crossed your mind a time or two. This article will explore several options, including free web hosting for WoW guilds and the benefits of running your own guild website.

Why Make a WoW Guild Site?

click to enlarge

So you run a guild in World of Warcraft, making a guild website is a logical progression for those taking it to the next level. A guild website will easily allow you to send out mailing lists, post raid times, track progression of players, and create a sense of community that often helps guilds grow and progress. You actually have a few different options when it comes to creating your own guild website, which even includes a few sites that provide free web hosting for WoW guilds. This article will discuss those options, and weigh the benefits of both free and paid hosting.

Free Web Hosting for WoW Guilds

It should be noted that there are options that allow free hosting for WoW guilds - but they will be limiting. Often you're restricted to a certain number of pages, they're littered with advertisements - often for places that do power-leveling and sell gold, and you might not get to use every feature you're looking for.

However, as far as options go, a free guild website is better than no guild website, right? Of course! After all, how else are you going to take in new recruits or schedule raids? Not to mention, this does mean that no one is going to foot the bill for the website. This is absolutely perfect for small, non-raiding, or casual guilds who aren't set to strict requirements or large numbers of members. Below are two free options to get you started.

Guild Launch

Guild Launch has been one of the most successful and popular free WoW guild hosting websites for quite some time now. Using GuildLaunch's free guild hosting allots a guild a meager 10 megabytes of storage and a sub-domain on the Guild Launch website, but allows each guild several perks!

Perks include: guild forums, polling, image galleries, raid planning tools, and event scheduling tools – not to mention, items are linkable in forum posts, and armory rosters are easily importable.

Guild Portal

Guild Portal offers one of the most powerful, fully free guild hosting packages. No bandwidth restrictions, 15 megabytes of storage, point-and-click setup, CSS management, tons of widgets, and even a configurable horde or alliance skin! Guild Portal also includes a nifty feature that allows you toi import NPC, item, and quest links in any content using an integrated WoW button in the included WYSIWYG editor.

Paid Options for WoW Guild Options

click to enlarge

The amount of features you can get depends somewhat on the amount you pay and your experience with web design. Reasonable web hosting isn't hard to find these days, and to be perfectly honest, paying for a year's worth of web hosting is going to be significantly cheaper than a year's worth of WoW.

If you're running a large raiding guild, paid options are probably far better than free options. With a paid option, you can host large forums, use plug-ins to track guild progress, send out newsletters, have on-site places for people to apply, and best of all: No advertisements!

There's a bit of research to be done when looking for web hosting. Ideally, your web host of choice should include a control panel for you to locate the specific settings your web-host provides you with. This will aid in setting up a forum or BBS, chatrooms, WoW addons, and CMS systems like Joomla which will greatly reduce the amount of time that you actually have to spend making your site and increase the time you spend using it. Not to mention, there are quite a few World of Warcraft-related Joomla templates and even WoW plug-ins for Joomla available out there!