Lots of people here use Geocities, Freewebs or other such shit hosting companies to host their games/screenshots. These hosts are nothing but evil. They often have limited bandwidth, limited file sizes or slow download times. And its quite frankly rude to the people here, who you expect to download and comment on your game even if it takes them all night to do so.

“BUUUT…” I hear you moan, “I don’t have anywhere else to put it!” Well, you do. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) almost CERTAINLY provides you with some form of webspace, especially ones you pay for (as opposed to pay-as-you-go dial up access). The only snag is that you probably have to upload it yourself, rather than use a nice pretty upload-via-file-selector (like the one that Geocities give you).

This isn’t hard. There are basically 4 steps:

1) Get Server Details

You must brave the perils of your ISP’s help page to find out the following information… you should know most of it anyway. Every decent ISP has a help page accessible directly from their homepage.

- Your Username
- Your Password
- The FTP Host name (sometimes called address)
- Whether or not to use Passive FTP – if nothing is mentioned about this, assume not
- The Remote site folder– again, if nothing is mentioned, assume there isn’t one

2) Get some FTP software

Easy to use software can be obtained for free. The most popular is WS_FTP; this is freeware, and you can get it from here: http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/file-transfer.html. A more advanced one (but still very easy to use) is Smart FTP; you can find this at http://www.smartftp.com. It is also freeware.

3) Put the server details in

In WS_FTP, click CONNECT and then click NEW. Type a name, host address; usually just FTP.host.com or something similar; you should have found out what it is from your ISP’s Website. To change options for passive FTP, click the Advanced tab. Change the Remote Site Folder (the folder on the server) and the Local Root Folder (the folder on your computer with your files in) via the Startup tab.

In Smart FTP, just type the details into the gaps on the toolbar up the top. The PASV button turns Passive FTP on or off.

4) Upload!

In WS_FTP, select the files you want to upload from the left hand selector and click the “-->” button in the centre. In Smart FTP, you can just drag and drop files in from Windows Explorer.

And that’s as hard as it gets. Find out the address of your webspace from your ISP’s website (usually http://member.host.com or http://www.host.com/member), and you can link to it at TDC! It’s your own webspace so direct linking is almost certainly allowed.

Try http://www.ftpplanet.com/ for more help if you’re still stuck, or post a comment.