I’m planning out a simple multiplayer game, and wondering how best to reduce “bandwidth” (i.e. monthly data transfer) for the Unity webplayer itself, which can take up a lot of memory. Aside from paring the code and assets down to a tiny size, is there any service that offers very low-cost hosting ?
The frustrating thing is that most hosting services charge as much (or more) for a GB of bandwidth as for a GB of storage, making it possible to store the data for a huge number of players but difficult to pay for the necessary bandwidth. It’s doubly frustrating given that bandwidth is the one thing that isn’t actually used up by an individual application - the data pipeline is still there for others to use a second later, unlike the memory your application uses. So why does bandwidth cost the same as storage?
How have other people solved this? It seems to me that the webplayer alone would eat up colossal amounts of bandwidth, even if the players’ browser keeps a cached copy ready to use the next time without downloading it again.
Try Nuggeta is free of charge and bandwith free to up 1000 concurrent players ( 2 millions visitors a month)
Can store as many player state and game state you wish and with full object API. now low level binary or json parsing. http://nuggeta.com
Getting start with Unity - Nuggeta http://developer.nuggeta.com/#!documentation/client-setup/unity
Thank you
First things first: Why are you hosting this yourself? Why not give it to Kongregate or Newgrounds and let them eat that cost? Then you only worry about the game traffic, not the client. How big is your client app? If it’s over 20MB, I don’t think they will accept it.
The cost of storage is dependent on hard drive costs, while bandwidth is based on the network. Hard drives are cheap and the telecoms charge $$$ for bandwidth, that’s why it may cost ~$.10/GB/month for storage and ~$0.12/GB for bandwidth.
If you really are intent on hosting it yourself, use VPS. A Virtual Private Server is half-way between shared hosting (don’t do that) and a dedicated server (probably overkill). Ramp it up when you get big bursts in traffic because your game is featured in the press and then down again a couple of days later. Just make sure the press gives you a heads up when it will run. Do daily searches on your game’s name to make sure there isn’t a social mention you missed that sends lots of traffic your way.
You may be able to find some competitive companies on http://lowendbox.com with VPS hosting.
DigitalOcean says it offers additional bandwidth for only two cents per GB, 1/6 the rate of Rackspace. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
Do you know anything about this company?
Looks legit. It’s been growing fast in the VPS world with it’s SSD high-performance servers and super low prices.
Another service to keep an eye on is Linode which offers 8TB of Transfer for $80/m. Their bandwidth cost is $0.10/GB in overage scenarios, but Digital Ocean charges for both up/down while Linode / AWS only charge for outgoing traffic.
But still, Digital Ocean’s $0.02/GB doubled for game play traffic would still only be $0.04/GB, a third of the low-volume price for AWS. Digital Ocean is a very competitive player.
Thank you for your question.
In your initial concern , i figured out 3 questions correct?
bandwidth limitation of providers to deliver web player version of your game
bandwidth limitation of providers for multiplayer data exchange
quality servers infrastructure of providers
About nuggeta
we should offer soon a webserver space to deliver web games version with no bandwidth limitation
multiplayer data exchange is unlimited thanks to our technology ensuring minimum network foot print even for massive realtime games
we are hosted on top hardware provider and with our multiplayer massive game server you enjoy pure box power gig network, big ram, big data, ssd. No elastic ramp effect , no virtualisation, you are on top of pure server processors.
And it´s free up to 1000 concurrent users wich is around 10 000 players per day. Is your game over taken this quota ?
For now we are in beta so you can go over for free ;). After it will be a maximum of 299$/mo unlimited per extra 1000 concurrent players.
With our services you dont need network, big data, social network integration, monetisation, neither data representation. Keep concentrated on your gameplay we scale for your game.
we should offer soon a webserver space to deliver web games version with no bandwidth limitation
multiplayer data exchange is unlimited thanks to our technology ensuring minimum network foot print even for massive realtime games
we are hosted on top hardware provider and with our multiplayer massive game server you enjoy pure box power gig network, big ram, big data, ssd. No elastic ramp effect , no virtualisation, you are on top of pure server processors.
And it´s free up to 1000 concurrent users wich is around 10 000 players per day. Is your game over taken this quota ?
For now we are in beta so you can go over for free ;). After it will be a maximum of 299$/mo unlimited per extra 1000 concurrent players.
With our services you dont need network, big data, social network integration, monetisation, neither data representation. Keep concentrated on your gameplay we scale for your game.
