Hosting for JSP game

Networking & Multiplayer
#1

Long ago I wrote an online turn-based game for up to 256 players. It consists of JSP pages and two server-side apps for computing the turns and managing player chat.

I hosted the game on my home network and had about 30 players (mostly friends). I thought it might be fun to brush the dust off and make it available for anyone to play. Can anyone suggest a cheap hosting service that could handle a game like this? I don’t want to risk running afoul of Verizon by running a website on my home connection since I rely on it for my living (contract programmer).

I could just host it on an alternative port (ie 8080) but then most of my players could not log in from work. Its a game where users will need to log in for 5-30 minutes a few times a day to manage their kingdoms.

Here is a screenshot of the game in case anyone is interested:

1023×836 247 KB

#2

I forgot to add that it uses MySQL to store all of the world information. Any database would probably do though.

#3

Interesting, do you use asynchronous server requests to manage that chat? Possibly something like DWR? Or is it just a frame refresh, since it seems you have the game separated pretty well.

Looks pretty cool for JSP though. Surprised you never ran into the 64kb limit issue (or did you and you were forced to “piece together” the files?).

And is that entire graphical frame clickable? I assume that map in the top left is also draggable… and apparently zoomable. Is there a ton of javascript behind this or is it more of a jsp refresh thing? Looks pretty impressive, I’d like to try it if you ever get it hosted.

Sorry no advice for you, but I thought the game looked interesting. Hope you find a web host.

I don’t think Verizon would mind if you tried to host a website from your home PC. At least I’ve never heard of anything like that (but I don’t really know). And people shouldn’t be playing from work anyway :wink:

#4

The chat is an applet that makes a socket connection to the server. Everything else is just Javascript. I avoided size issues by using frames.

It would be cool to rewrite this using lots of AJAX, but alas I have no time for it.

The graphical frame is clickable. It doesn’t do the google maps scroll n zoom thing (another cool addition I have no time for). Scrolling and zooming is done from the mini-map on the upper left. Thats all javascript.

Thanks for your comments. I’ll post it to Games Showcase if I ever get hosting figured out.

#5

eApps has the best customer service and their tech guys are quick. Hosting runs about $30 a month for VPS, but it’s the best I’ve tried.

#6

I’ve been a very happy customer of 1&1 for a couple years now as a hosting service. I have not used their VPS service yet but when the time comes to unleash a mighty Java game creation onto the unsuspecting world they are probably how I’ll do it. Both their Linux and 'doze VPS servers are $29 / month and they have a special for 3-months free:

http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=6834063.

They are very fast to respond and very technically savy and are very large and well established. My web hosting is full shell access and I run multiple wikis in addition to static sites and hosting mail for several family and friends. With the root Linux server you could setup the Java environment you want and have full control.

#7

I figured I would update this old thread.

I finally decided on MochaHost. They have some good deals on JVM hosting. I had to make a few changes to the game architecture to get it to play by their rules, but it all seems to be working fine now. Their first-tier support hasn’t been able to handle my technical questions/requests but they seem to have some competent people behind-the-scenes to pick up the slack.

I am planning a beta test sometime in the next couple of months. It remains to be seen if the plan that I chose is going to be able to handle the load.

Thanks again for the suggestions.