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Devblog Part #35 – A very technical couple of weeks

About two weeks ago I’ve posted about my new game, Swipey, shortly after posting I’ve noticed some server-side limitation with my hosting account at go-daddy that caused issues with posting big sized levels, so I decided to upgrade, for more control and better access.

Unfortunately, this seem to be simple task went completely wrong and my account was not available for over a week, after talking with the support 3 times and been told it was fixed and that I will have access in about 72 hours (each time in between), finally my account was up, but oh wait, they broke almost everything!, sites and games were not loading, wordpress plugins stopped working and what not.

This time I didn’t bother contacting them again and went a different way, a good friend of mine, Shuky, recommended hosting my own machine at amazon and setting a web server on it and was willing to help me do it, there are lots of pluses to hosting a machine, you have full control over everything, you pay per use (for more than average use it costs about the same as normal hosting) and the hosting is much faster and accessible to users.

The downside, is you need to setup everything yourself and it’s all done by typing through a talent client to the server (linux), I knew this is going to be a task and probably an ugly one, but I was up for learning some new stuff and fortunately Shuky was up for some tutoring, it turned out we both learned a lot in the process 🙂

So you start from all the basic stuff, like installing a talnet client, creating an ssh key, setting up sftp access and your ready!

For a web server to run you need install all the basic, PHP, apache, mysql, etc, we took a little shortcut here and installed a pre-made package ready to be used, in retrospect this caused us some problems with permissions and routing of domains, but we got an handle on that, eventually.

So now that you have a web server up, you need to start pushing in your content and hope it all runs well (I have 5 domains with 3 wordpress sites and a few plain html sites, online games and demos).
First things first, upload all the files (any sftp program will do, I use filezilla), second thing was supposed to be – set files and directories permissions, which we didn’t do and it came back to bite me in the ass later on.

The next step was creating mysql databases and importing exported wordpress sql files, this is fairly simple, 2 lines, one for creating a new database and one for importing, updating a table is a little more complex, searching, selecting, updating is all done manually and can get a little tiresome, I will probably set up phpMyAdmin for easier control over mysql databases.

A couple of hours in and we had the first site up and running, it still had some issues which I took care of later on, but mostly it looked promising and I was sure it’s all smooth sailing from here on.

And then a little shit storm hit the boat, we needed to host all the domains on the same account, which means they all point to the same server IP, and the server manage them by domains name and setting up virtual hosts that points to different directories on the server, this task was the longest of them all by far and kept us busy for plenty of hours, but not because we didn’t do it right, but mostly because of the pre-made package we installed, which had another included file that was blocking our code and it took us a while catching on to that.

Finally all is up and running, aside from a few small issues I still need to fix, everything looks fine and functioning, most importantly, Swipey, which had issues with posting levels and it is now fixed!

We also made progress with Bad Pad, but I’ll be setting up a separated post about it in a few days.

You might also notice I’ve switched domains for the devlog, it is now hosted at headbangames.com.