[web] Servers for a browser-based game

Hosts with unlimited offers tend to warn you if you impact other sites that are hosted on the same machine. There are some hosts who do not believe in warning and can just block your account.
I am aware of 2 games that use VPS hosting and they are not that resource intensive, in terms of display. They are more text based.

The best way would be to test your site for bandwidth usage and choose an appropriate host/host type

It all depends on your budget, '3 quid tottaly unlimited hosting' - is normally not something you wanna go for. Proper service doesn't have to be expensive (VM), shop around, also check stuff like Amazon S3 etc.

Thanks for the replies. I was looking at some of the Amazon Web Services. I was hoping that the $5 a month hosting would be sufficient, but I guess you get what you pay for.

In my experience most packages under $20 a month arent really worth going for, for anything that has to be up most of the time.

Many of the cheaper hosting packages do maintainence on their servers without announcing it beforehand, like others have said you get what you pay for and if you don't pay much you could go to log into your game one day and find a notice there saying PHP is down for maintainence.

Even worse, they could disable a feature without telling anyone, for 'security' reasons. For example, i once had to maintain a site set up on a cheap webhost where one day they just decided to disable all ability to send email through php. Needless to say i was stuffed and had to relocate. YMMV :-)

Hi Songbird,

You are going to want to stay far far away from anything that says UMETERED and UNLIMITED anything. It is absolutely fake 100%. There is not a single host that I know of that gives off 100% reliability or even 95%+ reliabilty with unmetered anything. Theres a couple reasons for it, but mainly it has to do with the fact that its a gimmick because people think they have expansive huge websites that are going to take up millions of megs. All in all most people will create a website that uses under 5 gigs a month. Thus it has no impact on them. The moment your website or game goes viral, your going to get hit hard.

I would reccomend if its a serious game, getting a VPS. I know its a but of a jump from a share system, but with a VPS your garunteed resources. On a shared network anything can happen. http://slicehost.com has a great starter entry hosting for your game. Take it small and increase it as you need. Its that simple.

-Mayple

Hi Songbird,

You are going to want to stay far far away from anything that says UMETERED and UNLIMITED anything. It is absolutely fake 100%. There is not a single host that I know of that gives off 100% reliability or even 95%+ reliabilty with unmetered anything. Theres a couple reasons for it, but mainly it has to do with the fact that its a gimmick because people think they have expansive huge websites that are going to take up millions of megs. All in all most people will create a website that uses under 5 gigs a month. Thus it has no impact on them. The moment your website or game goes viral, your going to get hit hard.

I would reccomend if its a serious game, getting a VPS. I know its a but of a jump from a share system, but with a VPS your garunteed resources. On a shared network anything can happen. http://slicehost.com has a great starter entry hosting for your game. Take it small and increase it as you need. Its that simple.

-Mayple

Rackspace has a ridiculous up time guarantee and they're good for it. I've dealt with them for several years and the ONLY time we have been down has been due to our own mistakes but never theirs.

^Meh,

I have had some issues with Rackspace, but thats on the development side. I do like Rackspace but when you start getting into the technical details and start talking ErLang sockets and opening certain access lines for customers they get very very antsy about charging you for a simple line edit on a server.ini . Its amazing what that company has done to a few of our clients to try and squeeze a little extra cash from them. I stay away from Rackspace and Rackfast.

However, http://mediatemple.net/ is another alternative which competes with Rackspace very very well, and if your not digging SliceHost, you can check them out. 20/mo gives you a failry decent server setup.

-Mayple

Thanks, those last couple of options definitely are worth looking into further.

I use host gator for most of my hosting, and honestly I've been very happy with them especially their customer support, the customer support in my opinion is sometimes more important then the actual hosting plan itself