Good online game hosting services?

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Good online game hosting services?

Nobuyuki(Posted 2016) [#1]
Hi folks,

I'm sure some of you have had more experience with this than I have. I had an idea for an online game I'd like to work on (turn-based), and was wondering what kinds of services there were out there to facilitate this that would be easy to use with Monkey. I remember seeing some nice-looking cloud services being touted on here at one point, resembling text message protocols, but it was "charge by message" stuff and I'm looking at a variety of options to keep the cost down for me should I decide to commercialize the project I'm thinking of starting.

What are some good hosting services for online games that don't necessarily need to be real-time? Anything with a free plan? Any large differences in the APIs used?

Thanks!


Xaron(Posted 2016) [#2]
Well, I think the most important question first is whether you need a server based (authorization and game) logic or if you prefer a room based approach without any server side stuff.

For the latter there are quite a lot of cloud based solutions out there, I started to wrap one of them, Realtime.co, you already stumbled across this. Good candidates for room based games might be card games for instance, where you don't need any server side logic. For storing data you could either use client side storage or a simple webspace PHP/MySQL solution.

When you need server side logic you need an own server and do this stuff for yourself even though there are already solutions out there where you can do scripting on the server side but the pricing is often not that attractive.


secondgear(Posted 2016) [#3]
If you have your own server, you can host this: http://www.baasbox.com You can use its REST API or write more advanced server-side scripts. Baasbox is also offered as a hosted solution, but if you already have a server, there is nothing to pay. There is no need to use their SDK on each target, the whole client-side part can be done through Monkey HTTP requests, making it as cross-platform as Monkey is.


rIKmAN(Posted 2016) [#4]
That baasbox looks great from the quick read of the front page I just did.

Has anyone got any experience of using it?