How does Digital Ocean fare a a hosting service? I have tried godaddy, linode, aws and eatj (the not so known vendor). All of these provider have their own advantages depending on your needs, the problem lies if you would want a versitile hosting environment which most developers want (In short a VPS hosting). Most would claim the best based on benchmark, value or support but what I think fits for a developer like my self would be something like digital ocean which offers a set of acceptable standards interm of price and value. I will not provide any benchmark that would justify digital ocean (there are so many review on that in the net already..), this is more of a recommendation based on personal experience. ^^, Spare a visit at digital ocean and use my id as reference. 

Just finshed our entry for the four day fgl contest. Although it was a four day contest, we could only alot less than 20 hours for both dev and graphics work hours for this game. The results were pretty good and the graphics were great. The game looks cool even it is only around 10%. Check the game at http://jyoru.com/savethytotem/ which is available for both pc and mobile devices. 

Yes, we have attended Indie Prize Asia with Core as our game entry. Basically we attended indie prize to meet people and get some idea's regading the indie game developer community. It is a three day conference with a lot of developers, advertisers and publishers within the region.

Google's free SMTP server API is no more. So are there other free API that can accept your mails of your domain? You can check mandrillapp they provide a free email inbound reciever. 

A quick way to install plugins for wordpress without setting up an ftp account is to modify the wp-config.php file and add the following line below. It will stop prompting the ftp request and it will allow you to directly download and install the require plugin.

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');