Buy in advance?

[dbest]

As some of you may know, I am in the process of developing a tennis PBBG. Currently, I am focussing my efforts on the back-end while a fellow team-mate is working on the front-end. I do not know how long it will take us to complete the game and if it will even see the light of day.

Of late, I have been viewing a few good promos and offers for VPS hosting and gullible(may not the right word I am looking for) that I am, I want to take up one such offer and buy a VPS along with the domain.

Would any of you take the plunge and buy a server even before you complete a game?

[e-fish]

I wouldn't "buy a server" but i don't think you suggested you are going to. I would certainly rent a cloud server where you pay per computer hour and per GB of bandwidth. I plan to get one as soon as I have a working game with most of the graphics done (doing the graphics has slowed progress right down for me, I am very bad lol). They don't cost much an hour so you could rent out a couple to test with one as "server" and one as "clients"- tsung is great.

[dbest]

Renting a cloud server is a new concept to me, but what you are suggesting seems like a good idea. I will have to google the term up and come up with a few companies that provide such a service.

I currently have a webhosting space which I use for development, but I do not think the hosting co. will let me use it when the game goes live.

[e-fish]

I would suggest checking out http://aws.amazon.com/ and http://www.rackspacecloud.com/ (I'm pretty sure I'll use rackspace).

The advantage is that you pay for what you use (bandwidth is not as cheap as it might be with other solutions) with no setup fees for scaling (up or down). They offer CDNs and other services too.

[dbest]

rackspacecloud seems to have a simpler UI. Will need to compare pricing at a later stage.

Thanks for the info.

[dbest]

Did a bit more reading on cloud space hosting. The idea seems good, but it can get expensive in the long run. I suppose using any cloud space hosting as a testing server for a period of a week or less would be ideal. Using such hosting for more than a month would be costlier that hosting it on a VPS.

[Chris]

Buying server in advance is a crazy idea.
Also, go for simple cheap shared. The day you had so many players that it breaks down and forces you to upgrade to VPS will be a happy day, celebrated for the year to come as a milestone few has achieved

[dbest]

That sounds more logical, Chris. Two main reasons why I was looking at VPS solutions were performance and ssh access. I suppose performance only becomes an issue when I have many players. SSH access, is something that I can get from my current webhost at an additional price.

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.

[dbest]

I think that all questions regarding web hosting posted anywhere are best off with the experts at www.webhostingtalk.com (just a personal opinion)

I have been following the forum on that site. Thats where I found some of the decent offers that made me think of taking up a package soon. They tempted me, so maybe its good advice to not visit the site till a game is ready ....

[Chris]

Actually, it is the other way around. You want to find a bad shared host, because any good host will kick out online games from their servers to protect other accounts from being laggy Of course, you don't want too bad host either, for obvious reasons, just bad enough

Yes, there are plenty of VPS worse than shared, stay out of these. You are perfectly capable to find an affordable VPS that is better than shared. In general, VPS should be more powerful than typical shared. And don't forget proper customisation, disabling Awast & Spam Assasin (definitely not the things you want to use resources for) alone can make a huge difference.

[dbest]

Actually, it is the other way around. You want to find a bad shared host, because any good host will kick out online games from their servers to protect other accounts from being laggy Of course, you don't want too bad host either, for obvious reasons, just bad enough

Yes, there are plenty of VPS worse than shared, stay out of these. You are perfectly capable to find an affordable VPS that is better than shared. In general, VPS should be more powerful than typical shared. And don't forget proper customisation, disabling Awast & Spam Assasin (definitely not the things you want to use resources for) alone can make a huge difference.

Lol the bad shared host part was really funny. That kinda research is gonna take much longer than finding a good shared host.

Do you mean awstats? I really like the detailed reports that they provide on one of my shared hosts. However I suppose, Google analytics can provide me with results that would be beneficial as well. I keep reading that cpanel also takes away a lot of memory, so a different control panel, like directadmin/plesk would be better.

[Chris]

Yes, awstats. Althrough I would start with this one, it provides tons of useful info. But once you move to VPS you would probably want to disable it.

Indeed, Cpanel uses more memory, but again, once you move to VPS you will have enough money to afford memory upgrade so it won't matter anymore.