Hello,

I'm going to start this off by saying the title may have misled you, I do not require assistance with hosting, but more along the line of assistance with finding games to host.

You're either, bored, confused or intrigued by now, so hopefully the latter, I'll move forward.

I currently work with a medium sized company who specialises in hosting indie developed games, Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound(soon), and the same, we work closely with the modding community of the above games.

This gives access to a direct community who are interested and enjoy side scrollers and 8 bit games, I think this community would be beneficial to BYOND and help bring fresh players and possibly developers into the fold.

Obviously you're thinking this is a business move so we can sell more servers, well, of course it is, we're a business! But there's more, in 2004 I created my first account on BYOND, I was only 16, I was one of the really annoying ones who created one of the millions of DBZ games that flooded the hub at this particular time.

As time went on I learnt more, and moved away from that and worked on libraries and similar, but essentially BYOND gave me the building blocks to move onto C-style programming and pushed me towards developing with php, since then I've worked in projects with C, C++, C#, VB6 etc etc.

But the point is, without something like BYOND there when I was younger, I'd not have continued learning and have the abilities I do now, to work where I do now, so BYOND deserves something back from me.

We recently formed a partnership with a large corporation in the UK that works with many FTSE 500 companies, also has ties to quite a few schools, they're planning to do a PR release about the partnership, I'm currently rushing to get some kind of BYOND support on our site for this.

My ideal solution is, as they'll be releasing this to schools and similar, is BYOND should be touted as an educational tool to teach basic programming skills at the very least, this would be free and large scale advertising of BYOND.

Not only that, we have a customer database of around 30,000 people who're all interested in these kind of games.

You're now thinking, "Okay, enough rambling, what do you want from us?", well that's the fun bit, I need a search box of some kind, a way to get BYOND games from the hub, onto a customers VPS so they can just click a button to switch between games.

Of course they'll still have SSH access to host it any way they like, but we plan to create a user friendly UI to work alongside our existing offerings to drive interest to BYOND.

I know a few of you on here have your own hosting companies, don't panic, we're going to be a fair bit more expensive than you anyway, so you're not going to be effected, our business model is very different to yours and will not put us in direct competition with yourselves.

I don't really want to PageScrape the BYOND hub as it will break with every layout update etc, plus it'd hammer the bandwidth, and given their recent change of financial model, I do not want to put any more stress on their pockets.

So, there's a big community of very smart people here, who wants to give some ideas and suggestions for hub integration?

~Paul T

P.S. Don't flame too hard, there are good intentions behind this, and I'm keeping names off this as this is not an advertising thread, it's in linux talk as this will be linux based and this is where Tom suggested I posted to work with the community to hit the spot on a hosting solution.