My positech website has been online since 1999. Initially it was just a page for my first game (Asteroid Miner) and a picture of my first cat. Since then, a lot has happened, and I have moved web hosts more times than I can remember. I was sensible enough to realize early on that you needed a folder for each game, and to be organised as a developer website, not just a single game website, but where I really screwed up is when I started thinking it made sense to have a separate server account for each game, with its own logins, and domain name, so you could stop any of those sites bringing down the whole server, by having bandwidth and disk space quotas etc.
When you are renting a physical dedicated server, this stuff seems no big deal. It also seemed pretty simple to host my own blog (this was originally on blogspot) and my own forums. When I was selling a lot of games, publishing third party games, and generally trying to ‘scale’, this all seemed reasonable and made sense. A lot of my games had some form of back-end php, if only for stats reporting, so having different php versions possible for each account was also considered fairly sensible.
But frankly fuck all that
In 2025 my life is very different. I have 100% stopped publishing 3rd party games. It was way, way too stressful, and only one of those games (big pharma) was a big revenue generator. I also have not released a new serious game since Democracy 4, although I made a little space shooter (gratuitous space shooty game) about a year ago (see below). I am working on a really fab game, but its more of a labour of love.
More recently, for various reasons, my company became a ‘large company’ for tax purposes, which is kinda funny, because it happened due to stock-trading, not actually selling games. Something this makes very clear is that in the last few years, I’ve done better financially as a stock trader than as a game developer. Granted, the market has been very bullish, but even so it does put into perspective just how much work running a games company is, for comparatively bad returns and a lot of stress and complexity.
Also… while I was relaxing after shipping Democracy 4, I somehow built a power station:
Something I learned the hard way, is that owning an energy company is VERY complex and VERY stressful. Added to all of this, I am now aged 56 and am supposed to be paying more attention to my health and happiness. Anyway, all of these factors combine to make me want to have a simpler games business than I currently have, and also therefore a simpler website. A simpler website means its easy to just move it to a cheaper server, and it means its much simpler to maintain.
So today I started the process of dumping all the various ‘siteworx’ accounts into just one. I will actually end up with two anyway, because one will be Positech Games, and one Positech Energy, but thats still way simpler than it is now. That means one version of php, which will be the latest one, and if that breaks older games (relatively minor) online features then so be it. Big AAA publishers literally switch off servers for old games, which I have never done, and frankly 15 years after an indie game’s release is, if you ask me, pretty understandable.
FWIW my forums are NOT on my website, but hosted for $50 a month, which is kinda annoying because they are so old, so I might just abandon them entirely. I should probably just download it all as an archive just in case… I know there is an argument for keeping forums for SEO but… really? In 2025? 99% of traffic seems to come from store websites anyway. And $600 a year would buy a lot of ads in comparison with people stumbling upon 15 year old forum threads.
So yes, you might be thinking “dude, you clearly make $$$ from the stocks, just keep the same web host and forum hosting”, and I can see the logic there, but I really hate *clutter*, and I find anything I pay for out of inertia, or subscribe to, or manage to be a form of clutter. My dream business has no website, no social media, no accounts anywhere, no paperwork, just me reading, making decisions and occasionally clicking a mouse. I am the polar opposite of those aspirational CEO types who want 2 personal assistants, a busy office with 100 staff and wall-to-wall meetings and appointments :D. I don’t need a lot of staff to make me feel important.
And lastly, I want to move my website out of the USA. Frankly, as world events continue on their current path, I do not want to pay any more money into a country whose leaders routinely hurl abuse at my own. Completely cutting yourself off from the USA as a games company would be super hard, but a website can be anywhere. I sell a lot in Europe and Asia anyway, so there is no magic rule saying I should be hosting my site in Texas anyway. Plus its nuts to be paid in $, convert it to £ then pay a website bill in $ later anyway. So when I am ready and do make my move, I will move both positech websites to the UK.
Currently I overpay a lot. My site, including this blog, seems very happy on its current server: 2 cores, 6GB RAM, 120GB storage, and yet somehow $80 a month? Fuck that. I expect to pay less than half that…