A friend wants to create an app that requires access to a server. She wants to know how to either find a cheap server, or how to rent space on one. What is the best way to do this?
What kind of access? If it’s just hosting files, almost any cheap hosting service will do. I use GoDaddy but there are many options. These are often only a few dollars a month.
Does it need access to a database like MySQL? Again, many service providers offer this through their basic plans (again, GoDaddy is one).
Does the server need to run a custom program of some kind? If so, she’ll want to rent a virtual machine of some kind. There is a huge range here. This site has some good deals on low-end virtual machines.
Does she expect to need to scale up the service indefinitely and handle very high peak loads? If so, she’ll need a virtualized system built with scalability in mind. The first that comes to mind is Amazon’s AWS. It is not all that cheap, but you only pay for what you use. If you service becomes very popular rapidly, they have the capacity to handle it. You don’t want users to turn away from your nascent service because the server was bogged down.
Anyway, some more details would help narrow down the best option for her.
Since the OP is looking for advice, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Registering a domain name with Netfirms or godaddy will give you some space and limited traffic. If her “youtube” clone or whatever becomes popular and exceeds the traffic for the basic account they will notify her about the traffic and expect you to pay for upgraded services and traffic allowance.
BTW, what kind of server? FTP, SMTP, HTTP, you may need upgrades for some types of servers, especially smtp.
Amazon Web Services give you a free micro server for a year when you sign up. Heroku also has a free tier if you’re developing apps and is quite a nice development environment.
It’s a simple very low-graphic game app where two or more people can meet to play online. She’s thinking there has to be something out there if there’s so many free game apps out there running on servers.
To be clear, this is a native app (for say a mobile device), and she wants a server to act as a matchmaker and means of transferring game data? Is the game turn-based, so that relatively long latencies (say, on the order of a second) are acceptable? I assume the initial user base will be fairly small?