I posted this first in another thread, not realizing what this one was for… I believe this is actually where this one goes.
I have a LAN server on my localhost using the default Unity multiplayer, which I believe is referred to as UNET.
I want to be able to move my hosting from my PC to the some server hosting like heroku, but I don’t know how to do that.
Is there an external server that can allow multiple PCs to connect to my game for free out there?
If you have any advice suggestions, or answers, please answer. Thank you. I’m not sure I did the formatting right for this thread… If it turns out I posted it in the wrong place or didn’t tag it correctly, please tell me so I can fix it.
As @TwoTen alluded to, services like Amazon’s EC2 provide virtual servers of all sizes, some of which come for free within certain limits of usage.
I’ve been using AWS for a while now, running a SmartFoxServer based game and it’s been working great. Price-wise they are reasonable and the first GB of traffic is free of charge. If you plan to use their servers for a while you can save money by paying for reserved instances. They are the same EC2 servers, but you pay upfront (for a number of months) and save a significant bundle.
“Free” hosting options are very limited, in that you will have significant performance and bandwidth restrictions, as these are basically demos of their higher tier paid services.
The best cost wise is to set up your own linux box on your home broadband, and use a dynamic DNS service to point a hostname always to your home network IP (and use port forwarding on your router to point to the linux box). The risk with this is home internet may have TOS restrictions against setting up a server like this, and could potentially cut you off (though unlikely unless you were causing some kind of noticeable performance issue for your segment of their network with all your traffic - enough for them to investigate the anomaly).
The best price/performance ratio is renting somewhat outdated dedicated servers, where you’ll get a lot of resources for under $100 per month, even under $50 for some configurations.