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 Welcome, and thank you for considering GuildPortal as the provider of web hosting and content
managment for your guild! The following sections briefly explain
what GuildPortal is, and what the major benefits are to using us as your community's host.
If you have any questions not covered here, please feel free to
contact us, check out the Frequently Asked Questions,
or visit the GuildPortal Admin Community,
where other people who use GuildPortal get together to ask questions, help out,
and sometimes just hang out.
With a typical hosting package, you are allotted disk space and given account
codes to log into an FTP server to start uploading your source code. Higher-end
hosting typically includes a blank database that you can use to store your
data. In most cases, all of the source code, controls, and content is your
responsibility to either program yourself or buy and integrate an array of
non-compatible 3rd party tools.
Some services advertise "guild hosting," but offer little or nothing along the
lines of actual content that's built to help you manage a guild. Often, it's the
same type of hosting that people get when they want to throw up a page or two with
photographs of their dog.
Forums, event scheduling, raid points (DKP), news, information sections,
categorized links, web-based mail, roster, voting, quest tracking, quotes, IRC (real-time) chat, vault, customized
game news, stories, medals, library, freeform text/html, and tradeskill listings all come standard and are as easy to add and place as a couple of mouse clicks.
For those guilds lucky enough to have an in-house programmer, more customized content types are available such as custom
XML/XSL transforms and RSS feeds. Giving your site a look and feel that's unique to your guild has never been easier!
Do you have an alliance in-game with another guild that uses GuildPortal? If you do, you'll find our alliance
tools invaluable in helping you make your alliance an actual community. You can share forums and events with as many guilds in your alliance
as you want to!
GuildPortal's pricing is transparent, with no hidden charges. There is no "community chest" that your members
are asked to fill. Typically, with the community chest model, if you decide to switch hosts, the money in the chest is lost to you and your members
forever. It benefits the host by making the decision to pick up shop and move to a host that better suits your needs difficult because of the money
already paid, that would be lost. At GuildPortal, we feel that honesty is always the best policy, and our pricing model shows it.
GuildPortal isn't run out of a basement and it's not a hobby. We've moved from a shared hosting service to the best infrastructure provider in
the industry, with multiple, routinely backed-up dedicated web and database servers, hardware firewalls
and load balancing, managed backup and more.
Guilds require integrated systems that don't require multiple logins. Systems
such as event scheduling and attendance tracking, web-based mail, foruming,
banking, and automatic game news updates are essential to a living, breathing
guild community site. A system that truly helps build a more cohesive, participatory
community.
GuildPortal is just such a system. It's not a mish-mash of 3rd party tools, nor is it
a generic content management system with a couple of graphics that say "Guild" to differentiate it. It's
built from the ground up specifically for guilds, requires absolutely no programming, and includes an easy-to-use control panel to make
content management, member management, and all of your administrative tasks easy and quick!
After all, wouldn't you rather be playing the game than bothering with the low-level
hassles and tedium of reinventing the wheel?
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