I’m thinking about using an external servers to handle cross-server matchmaking. Are there any websites(preferably free) that will be able to handle around 10 requests per second?
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Depends, if you’re a student and have a .edu / .ac.uk ect email then you could always look into the GitHub education pack as they offer Heroku (2 years free), AWS ($175 credit) and Digital Ocean ($50). You could also go with the Heroku free plan but I’ve never used it but that’s always worth a try.
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Although I will add onto this, I’ve used Digital Ocean before and my account out of the blue with no emails got deleted, I’ve been using Amazon Web Services for my game analytics tool for months and I’ve had no issues since so I would highly recommend AWS, cost p/m is not bad at all either.
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I’ve also been on the look for cheap servers lately and after some research I currently favor OVH. Didn’t try it yet though.
All plans include unlimited traffic.
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If you aren’t a student, you can use Google Cloud Platform’s Free Tier (has an always free option). I find it better to use than Heroku’s considering you have almost full control over the VPS.
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This isn’t a VPS, but it has good storage if that’s what your looking for. (don’t mind the .no, that’s just something for me)
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There aren’t very many good free options out there unless you’re a student. Most of the free tiers I’ve seen are more like one year long free trials, after that you have to pay.
I’m currently paying $5/month for a Linode VPS, which gets me a server running Linux that I can install anything I want on. Different services have different pros/cons, like:
AWS / Google Cloud / Azure
Pros
- Scales up really really easily
Cons
- Expensive
- High learning curve
- You’re locked into their stack, you’ll have to re-learn everything from scratch and rewrite all your code to switch to a different one
Heroku and Heroku-likes
Pros
- You just write code
- Pretty simple
Cons
- You’re locked into their stack, and what languages they support. If you want to use another service, you have to rewrite all your code.
VPS
Pros
- Administrating a Linux box is a very well known subject
- Pretty low learning curve
- Use any language you want
- No dependency on a particular company’s service/pricing
- Usually pretty cheap
Cons
- Doesn’t scale up, if you have a game that suddenly becomes popular you’ll need to rapidly migrate to a more scalable solution
- Can sometimes be a chore to maintain
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Alright. Thank everyone! I’ll look into some of these options.
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I personally think Heroku is a good host. I’ve used it before and it is pretty stable. However, it does sleep every 30 minutes unless you have an application pinging it or have paid heroku.
Trello can easily accomplish your needs.
If you’re able to invest a small amount, do some research, and able to handle a slight increase in electric bill from usage/cooling, you could go the route I did and buy an old rack server.
I got a Dell R810 4 pCPUs, 80 threads, 64GB RAM for less than 500$. Yeah, it’s a bit of an initial investment, but it saves money in the long run (even being on 24/7, mine averages under 400 watts usage)
I recommend if you use Heroku, I’ve used it before it works amazing. It does have a 25-30 minute down time when in “sleep” but otherwise its great!
Heroku
Would recommend this, only if you have the internet to support this. A small to medium sized game could easily run off a 100 mbps internet. Be aware some ISPs don’t like customers running websites on a residential connection.
As for hardware, i did the same and got a HP ProLiant DL380 g6, currently runs a discord bot, and has redundant raid, etc. 12 cores in total. Got it for like 400-500$ as well.
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I’d also note for others reading this that a 100 Mb/s residential connection means download speed. For most service providers I’ve seen, the upload speed is usually around 1-20 Mb/s for residential connections. Generally, you’d want to connect your server with a business connection, like the ISPs recommends. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are reasons. xD
When looking for a server, be aware that marketer’s will capitalize (hehe…) on the ‘coolness’ factor of owning a server and try hard to sell you what looks like the greatest things, but really is not even as powerful as your grandmother’s computer (with the dust). Most services now days will be running on SSDs. 1 GB ram and 1 virtual processor is generally enough for most games, and costs between $4 - $10 a month.
For computationally intensive operations (matchmaking, pathfinding, solving in general) then there are some things to be aware of. Matchmaking is a NP-complete problem meaning that done properly, it is a O(n^2) operation, scaling with the number of players. With a couple thousand players, your server is in for a beating. Pathfinding scales with the map, but if the map is already known some precomputing can be done to speed up real-time requests. For these tasks you will want to look into a server with more ram, and maybe another processor or two. I personally like the cloud services because you can generally start in a free tier, and then when you realize that your application requires more or less processing than you need or your requirements shift because your game gets more popular, it is as trivial up clicking a couple buttons to upgrade the hardware your machine is running on.
Do you recommend your vps host?
If so, link to it?
Google linode pricing (I’m not supposed to share links to sites other than twitter/github/etc).
They have good uptime, and they use KVM instead of Xen/etc so they don’t have to reboot your VPS as often due to security patches. You get pretty good specs for the price, and you can run any linux distro. The management tools are pretty good, including the ability to make backups/etc (those will cost extra). Unlike many other VPS hosts I’ve used in the past, Linode doesn’t cram VPSes onto not enough physical machines, so you should be fine taking full advantage of the CPU, RAM, and network pipe you’ve been allocated.
Obviously, this is not an official endorsement from Roblox, but my own view using them for hosting my personal websites/etc.
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