Starting a clan is hard enough without having to come up funds for hosting, so I put together some options for hosting, forums, and tools to make life a bit easier. The philosophy should remain that you want to grow larger and get your own domain and own hosting, but the is nothing wrong with starting out using a free service.

Free Clan Website Hosting :

Here are some of the “All-In-One” sites and sites advertising free clan site hosting. I have not explored all of them, and if you guys come across any others that you like let me know and we can add them in!

http://clansitemanager.com/

http://www.enjin.com/

http://www.clantoolz.com/

http://www.clansites.com/

http://www.gamerdna.com/groups/hosting

http://www.clanister.com/

http://www.zuild.net/

http://www.clansite.us/

Call of Duty only:

http://www.codnet.com/order/

Tools:

Tools for clans are a bit more tricky, and I understand that each clan and each game will have it’s own nifty set of useful scripts. I included VWar, which was very popular among my generation of clans as an example.

http://www.clantemplates.com/

http://www.clanthemes.com/564.html

VWar offers a very cool scrim & match recording tool, at the time of posting they are re-working the site..

http://www.vwar.de/

http://www.myclantemplate.com/free-templates/

Forums:

Forums are one of those “Must-Have” tools, and I know there are TONS of these out there, these I have seen clans use before.

http://www.forumotion.com/

http://www.freeforums.org/

http://www.freephpbb3.com/home.php

http://www.proboards.com/

http://www.eamped.com/

Moving UP:

All the free tools and hosting in the world won’t make your team, teams must be worked on and built up. You could even expect to have to re-do all your hard work when you move to a paid host and your own domain. Remember this is not an easy thing to succeed at, and clans require an a lot of effort.

Don’t Let That STOP You!

Use free services to get yourselves going, and grow from there. Perhaps you are afraid that other teams will think badly of you for having free services? Perhaps you think you won’t be able to recruit? Its not true, any team that has been trough difficult times with funding will understand your using free service, and any new recruit will like the fact that they are not paying for your overhead.

- Hedge

© 2009 TribeHaven