Jpac wrote:Too many people who once were here, I imagine.
Is it even possible to still use comicgenesis to host comics? I was thinking of revamping a comic, and when I tried to login at the main page there was an error.
Where does everyone host their comics?
There are exactly three:
1. People host it themselves on their own VPS. Stay away from Dreamhost, Bluehost and other mass-hosters because...
2. People are still using wordpress/comicpress/webcomic, but it's so bloated and top-heavy now that if you host it on a cheap host they will disable/delete it on you.
3. If you are serious about your webcomic, you lease a VPS/full server. If you insist on using Wordpress, you will need to overprovision your requirements by about 60 times. Seriously.
A full wordpress setup to do a webcomic now requires 192MB of ram and a 128MB opcode cache. Per Site. By comparison several other light CMS's require only 10MB of ram and will survive with no opcache at all.
There are a few webcomics that are so large that (that originated on keenspot, or are still on keenspot) that switching the CMS to wordpress would require 4 or 5 servers. Meanwhile the best advice I offer for setting up a webcomic today is "don't use wordpress, you will regret it", Frumph (who is the maintainer of comicpress) will disagree with me on this frequently, but I'm saying this as a technician, not the user.
The thing that hasn't changed since 2004 is people still don't know what they are getting into. If you want to see if your comic is a good idea, post it on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or something that people can easily share. If people love it, keep doing it until you have a dozen and if you're not burned out on it, then buy a domain and host it yourself.
The Hiveworks typically converts old WP sites (eg see gwscomic.com) to their own extremely lightweight comic-centric CMS, but you lose most of the wordpress baggage. So if you absolutely must moderate every single comment, then you will be investing in an entire server or half a server just for that. If you can't justify that cost, then opt out of comments and blogging parts.
How many comics can you stick on one server? Well the id's on comicgenesis are in the X0,000's, how many of those are active? maybe a dozen or two. The front page is basically the only evidence that comics still update. If the front page ceases to have any pogs (other than after a reboot) then nobody is using it anymore.
Realistically you can only put 8-10 moderately popular comics on a server, or maybe 4 if they run wordpress if you have 32GB of ram. The bottleneck is the popularity. You can stick 50 comics on one server that has less than 10,000 views per day. I did a few estimates a few years back for Pixietrixcomix.com and basically hosting costs work on a bell curve. When you're not very popular, hosting is cheap. When you're gaining popularity, it suddenly becomes very expensive, very quickly, but once you reach the plateau, the costs drop off because presumed book sales or ads, or now Patreon, justifies the cost.
Also certain comic sites get DDoS'd once in a while because people still are asshats to women on the internet.
My suggestion if you're still in the webcomics game, is put your content out there, but use Patreon as the actual "new comic in X days" reward tier, put your patreon address in the images, and try to share the content yourself before the pirates do. There is nothing sadder than a comic getting ripped and posted to Tumblr, Imgur, or e-hentai before the artist makes any money on it.