Hi.
I'm planning to publish a multiplayer game.
Think in a demanding game like an FPS or an RTS, one very sensitive to lag.
So far people have recomended me Azure and Amazon, but I'm triying to find all possible options to evaluate all.
The answer really depends on your budget. You have 3rd-party cloud based options like Azure and Amazon EC2. You have 3rd-party dedicated hosting solutions (tons of them out there; just Google for dedicated hosting). You also have the option of building your own datacenter or using a collocation option (you give them your server (your hardware); they host it in their building).
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The cloud based options will often be a good option for those on a small budget. Often times they will allow you to start up new server instances rather quickly (usually in under 15 minutes). They allow you to grow and shrink your server power very quickly. EC2 charges by the instance-hour (at various levels of instance power). I’m not exactly sure how Azure does their pricing. I do know that Amazon has datacenters throughout the world so if your target audience is in Europe, for instance, you can have all of your servers over there. It seems like Azure also has a similar feature.
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Dedicated hosting would be more expensive and would be something you would want to look into if you had a solid demand for your game, or you could support the cost. If you receive a sudden boost of traffic to your servers, it would likely take time to get more servers setup.
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Collocation is also another option. It is slightly more expensive than dedicated hosting. Basically, you bring in your servers and they hook it up to their infrastructure. It does require that you maintain your own hardware and pay for upgrades, however. Scaling is an issue because buying and getting these extra servers setup would take quite a bit of time.
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There is also the extremely expensive option of owning your own datacenter. This is typically out of the question as it is extremely expensive because you have to pay for all the hardware, the facility, the staff, etc.
I would recommend using a cloud hosting solution. It is best in terms of scalability: if your game is a total hit and you designed your server architecture well, pretty much all you need to do is launch more server instances; on the opposite end, if your game flops, you can just shut down a bunch of servers until you only have a few that can support your current active online population.
I do know that you can get very good performing servers through the cloud. As Amazon and Microsoft (providers of Elastic Compute Cloud and Azure Services Platform, respectively) have quite a bit of experience in computing platforms, and have fairly large datacenter resources (like bandwidth), you probably will not need to worry about lag all that much.
P.S. On a personal note, I intend on using Amazon’s EC2 for hosting my multiplayer servers. If you intend on having a server running the Unity engine, try getting it to work on WINE (Windows emulator-like thing for Linux); it will cut the cost of hosting considerably).
EDIT: Just noticed that this was a really old question… Oh well. At least I wasn’t the one that bumped it… At least I helped answer for those wondering about this in the future.
Maybe think about dedicated hosting Solutions but really its depending on your budget, just search on google for dedicated hosting. Dont really no if thats what your asking? hope i helped