I am aware that each hosting provider has its pros and cons, however it seems tricky to find the right one, looking for one that can be tried for free by someone who is new to networking and has no knowledge of c++ (But can follow a tutorial, aka the second to worse case scenario), it seems hard to pick one, as they all have their own issues.
Amazon web services seems quite intimidating, playfab’s pricing seems intentionally almost impossible to predict what it will be, digital ocean requires you to actually be good (Which i am not.), etc.
So, what should a newbie with a year of BP experience and a minimal-no budget pick?
What are you trying to do exactly? It all depends.
Cloud stuff ties you into nasty software for the most part. And for something like a personal website offers no benefit whatsoever to either the end user or the owner.
For something that needs scalability such as a well established website with 10tb a month of bandwidth usage, that’s when you complicate things and push them onto a scalable cloud solution.
Normally, those types of clients have their own server setup, or maybe more than 1 rack at one or more data center - (which is essentially a cloud already :P)
So, assuming you are looking to learn - depending on what it is that you want to learn and why, you’d go with that.
Aws for trying to find work or buff a resume is OK. Clients are sparse. Cost is really high for them too. But it looks good as a skill.
Azure pays more. Has even less clients. And its the usual m$ pile of C# if you get my meaning.
Other providers like rackspace offer what essentially ends up being regular hosting telling you its cloud based and making you pay for it. On the upside those may not require any skill, and will likely take any sort of LAMP or MEAN stack files… not positive on it. No one actually wants those ;p
If your goal is to host Unreal binaries built for Windows on a server that’s globally accessible, Azure is probably the best choice for an operating business. Azure also supports Linux, but their “home turf” is Windows.
If your goal is to host Linux-based infrastructure for a game (be it Unreal servers or web servers or whatever) then Amazon is probably the best choice for an operating business. Amazon is the most robust, and thus knows to charge the most, though – especially bandwidth is super expensive on Amazon compared to most other providers, so don’t host a bulk download service there
If your goal is to learn network programming, you can do this on your local machine, and then bet something cheap (like, even a Raspberry Pi 4 might work) for “the other machine.” No cloud host needed. (If you want two machines both running Unreal, clearly both machines need to be Unreal-capable, so you’d need something with a little more oomph than a Pi for that.)
If your goal is to learn Linux in general, you can do that in a virtual machine. You can use vagrant+virtualbox for free, or you can buy a cheap key for VMWare Workstation (which I like better than virtualbox) on eBay (these are typically unused bulk/enterprise keys being resold by IT departments) or if you are running Windows Pro on your local machine, you can use Hyper-V (my preferred option.)
