Python or C server hosting for indie development

Monday, March 7, 2011 by Nate Bross

Someone asked on Game Development:

I’ve written a lot of the game, but it’s singleplayer. Now we want to join up and play together.

I want to host it like an MMO, but haven’t got any personal ability to host (no static IPs or direct access to a reasonable router that will allow me to port forward) so I wondered if there were any free / very cheap hosting solutions for people developing games that need to develop their MMO side.

In my case it’s a world server for a 2D game where the world map can be changed by the players. So, GAE sounds expensive, as there would be quite a few updates per second (I heard they bill for data updates but not for download, but can’t find refernce to billing anywhere on the FAQs)

I’d prefer to be able to write the server in python as that’s what the game is written in (with pygame), but C is fine, and maybe even better as it might prompt me to write some more performant world generator code ;)

I posted the following answer, which was chosen as the accepted answer and received 3 upvotes:

You might want to look into getting an EC2 instance (Micro) — you can run basically whatever you want on them, so writing python shouldn’t be a problem.

The smallest Linux instance is $0.02/hr as I recall, so it shouldn’t run you all that much.

However, I would build and test your server code on a LAN, and only once that is working well would I start looking for external hosting options. No need to pay for an Internet server, until you have something to actually test.

Originally posted on Game Development — 3 upvotes (accepted answer). Licensed under CC BY-SA.