Is there a place where I can host a server for my game? I need a server that I can have on 24/7 and that can backup player data. It needs to be able to communicate with as many people that are playing. (The game I need it for works the same way as Dark Souls, where you don’t actually play with everyone at the same time but you can see them and receive help in the way of notes or items)
I would focus on the game mechanics before I go looking for a server to buy, A MMORPG is going to take a long time to create, you dont want to be paying for server access that you will not be using, in the meantime you could just build a server farm testing environment on your machine to test as you develop.
For testing purposes i would get a program called VMWare i use it regular in the class im in, what it does it that it creates a viritual machine on your system, so its a computer within the program.
You can get it here: http://www.vmware.se/
What you need to get going is a operating system, for this i recomend windows server 2008 there is a free trial on microsofts download center, that should get you going for testing.
If you really know what you are doing you could start looking into renting a server.
After a minute of googling i found a site that does just that: http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/dedicated-servers.aspx
Before you rent you should get your game working completly using VMWare though, you don’t want to pay money just to play around.
Sounds like what you want is something along the lines of Google App Services, alot of their services are free up to a point, which they have set caps, like for certain amount of messages, but the caps for small infrequent usage are very generous on small scale such as for inventory storage and management, with flexible upgrade options.
For things like Server Hardware, here’s an in depth server hardware overview guide.
Episode #324: Choosing Server Hardware:
There’s questions like, you wanna use Unreal Engine’s built-in multiplayer networking and host a copy of server on another server, or do you wanna make use of a 3rd party server or system, etc… Alot of options available.
There’s technologies such as SmartFox Servers Available, some online games use that, some companies offer dedicated hosting specifically for that:
If you want global coverage then going up to Google Application Services, Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, Amazon AWS Services, are a few, there’s a bunch out there can be used for gaming network scenario’s, alot of people these days using Google App Services, and even Microsoft’s Windows Store App Services, such as for player MMO inventory storage and processing, base text messaging, inventory item emailing, etc… There’s also Facebook, which alot of app’s use for things such as account management and login processing, social communications, and turn based or light gameplay.
Depends purpose and how big you wanna go, develop the game first locally and setup heavy local LAN testing before implementation, and there’s choices such as a virtual hosting solution, a hybrid solution, bandwidth and availability.
Old school method would be start local LAN and limited remote for early development and testing, then expand into your own co-located server setup, but I recommend the current cloud based approach so it’s point and click configuration of hardware and software and no need to physically travel to any location and mess with things which can be time consuming.
Goodluck!