Home | Company | Case Studies | SimsHost Case Study: A Gaming Site that grew to be the largest Sims site in the world! SimsHost SimsHost is by far the largest Sims site in the world, yet it has the lowest subscription cost, making it the best value in Sims sites you will find anywhere. SimsHost provides web hosting services for fan sites for computer games. Our initial emphasis was on The Sims, and we expanded to host sites for other games as well.  Revenues from download fees and subscriptions cover all the web hosting and user support costs for the webmasters. The Challenges SimsHost stared out as Moon Sims, a game site sponsored by Artemis Society International. Its central theme was living on the Moon in one hundred years' time. It tied together downloads, discussions, essays, and pointers to Luna-suitable material on other Sims sites.However, the site grew so quick that it became obvious that another server and site were required to handle the volume. The Search for a CMS Solution Moon Sims was already using CyberTeams' products to manage its site, so the simplest solution was to obtain a separate server for SimsHost; no need for conversion to another product.. The Result SimsHost opened on June 1, 2002, with more than two dozen sites for you to enjoy! By September 26, 2002, it had grown to 41 great Sims sites. Today SimsHost hosts more than 80 sites that are all about the phenomenal computer game, “The Sims.”  Each site has its own web team, varying from solo webmaster-artists to sites with large maintenance teams supporting a wide variety of artists who create things for the game.  The webmasters' expertise varies from veteran webcrafters to those who ask, "How do you spell HTML?" TeamWSD from CyberTeams allows SimsHost's administrators to efficiently deploy and manage a large number of sites.  The integrated user database makes it easy to set up new webmaster accounts where the same people work on several different sites. Every page of the main SimsHost site has been built and maintained with WebSite Director (WSD) templates, allowing administrators to update hundreds of pages right on the server with one click of the mouse. Templates used by neophyte webmasters provide good-looking, easy-to-maintain sites, and also allow them to spend their time creating the content for their sites instead of being lost in the tedium of HTML. TeamWSD’s ability to deploy a web space with the WebDAV interface already installed is vital to our ability to host and manage so many sites. The interface is easy to learn. Using Web Folders, NetDrive, and Web Drive as their client, our webmasters upload files directly to the server in the familiar environment of the Windows Explorer. And with far greater security than is available with FTP.  WebDAV allows us to use Photoshop to edit image files directly on via the server, saving thousands of hours in site maintenance on these image-intensive web sites