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We talked about game hosting some time ago in brief and this article is also somewhat attached to game hosting. But there are distinct differences between game hosting and hosting services called Guild Hosting (or Clan Hosting). Rather than hosting game servers where games are run, Guild hosting provides support for online gaming communities. These services are outside of gaming environments.

Guild hosting companies typically provide services such as but not limited to; public or private forums for game community members to communicate including instant messaging software and chat servers, applications to schedule and organize evening related to gaming such as tournaments, and facilities to promote the gaming community and events. For these services, the hosting company doesn’t need to have sophisticated infrastructure with high capacity servers and high network bandwidth as in the case of game hosting due to the fact that Guild hosting just provides specific light weight services for these communities.

When these gaming communities (guilds) started, they used bulletin boards such as vBulletin and phpBB for communications and publications. But the enhancement of the complexity of the games, their game play and the number of membership required more sophisticated scheduling and roster management tools. There were few companies such as GuildPortal and GuildCafe who identified this requirement and provided facilities including social networking up to some extent.

There are usually two types of communication between game players; on-game and off-game. Guild hosts only provide the facilities for the latter. Although the guild can maintain a server for such communication by them, guild prefer a guild host due to the maintenance overhead involved when maintaining own servers. In 2006, Guild Launch was formed to expand the existing guild communities to the level of social networking and to deliver high quality, easy-to-use tools.