Hosting for social / casual MMO

Unity Engine
1

I’m currently putting together the details for a Facebook app that will be designed as a sort of “casual social MMO” with a simplified form (only indirect person-to-person interaction) but hopefully with a large number of players. The indirect nature of it should keep “bandwidth” (transfer) to a relatively low rate (no twitch movement), but the total amount might still be significant if the user base ever grows large enough. My question is: what are the best hosting options for this ? I’ve been looking at 11’s options - they offer everything from cloud servers to dedicated servers to cheap “unlimited” accounts - but their Terms and Conditions are confusing.

Section 3.1.5 contains the following gem (keep in mind that all of their regular packages promise “unlimited bandwidth”):
“Unless provided otherwise in the specifications for your Services, Bandwidth use, including but not limited to data retrieval from your Web Site, e-mail traffic, and downloads, shall not exceed six gigabytes per month.”

Does this mean that “unlimited” really means six GB / month, or doesn’t that apply to the “unlimited” packages? It doesn’t say. Their “unlimited storage” is genuinely unbounded (more or less), since their Terms and Conditions page says that the theoretical quota starts at 50 GB and is automatically incremented as needed, without defined limit. But the bandwidth issue is confusing.

Their Terms also has a strange requirement in section 8.23, which forbids operating a chat room (!) unless specifically granted by the terms of your package. Does that also rule out multiplayer games (if you extend the logic), especially since Section 8.16 says your webspace must be used for a “conventional Web Site” (without defining what they mean by “conventional”).

In all their various packages, the main theme is that storage space is dirt cheap but bandwidth is hard to come by (sometimes impossible to increase for any amount of money) unless the package claims “unlimited bandwidth”. This seems odd, given that 11 is a massive system that hosts millions of websites, and bandwidth is the one thing that isn’t directly consumed by individual accounts - i.e., a chunk of memory can only be used by one account but data transfer is ephemeral. So why do they have such odd provisions?

Anyone have any insight into this?

2

Has anyone used Rackspace? They have flexible plans with decent pricing, although MySQL databases are relatively expensive for some reason.

3

No shared hosting has “unlimited bandwidth”. You either need a cloud server that can be ramped up or a dedicated server.

I’m sure rackspace is competitive. You can get a free year of a micro instance from AWS. That will be good for the initial development.

And for the sake of all that is holy, make sure your monetization can cover your expenses. Otherwise you’'ll be wishing you had shared hosting to shut you down before your game virally exploded your bank account. Just keep an eye on it daily and be ready to throttle it down if it’s costing too much.

4

Yes, I’m well aware that “unlimited” doesn’t mean “infinite”. But it’s supposed to mean “unmetered” or “unbounded”. (Edit: I contacted 11, and they said the limits in the “Terms Conditions” do not apply to “unlimited” packages, but only to older (deprecated) packages that used to have bandwidth limits. So it seems there isn’t an arbitrary limit for bandwidth).
I looked at the AWS site. The free year offer sounds good, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it would entail. How do they define “instance”? In context, it would seem to mean an individual application or game regardless of how many users it has ? Their site doesn’t seem to define it.

5

Take a look at Leaseweb or Amazon AWS.

If you get your own VPS or dedicated server you don’t need to worry about MySQL hosting. You can just remote desktop in and install MySQL on your server yourself.