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Ideas for Hosting A Game Server
Hello All,
I'm seeking advice and ideas for hosting both a Unity game and website. Specifically, I would like information about which hosting solutions you have used that are scalable and easy to work with.
I've signed up with Amazon's EC2 service to host our Asset Server but am not sure how best to integrate a website with that site.
Your thoughts and advice are greatly appreciated.
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Answer by BerggreenDK · Jul 20, 2011 at 11:02 PM
I've been researching quite a lot on Amazon AWS too.
I think of EC2 as a "real server", thats one with RAM, CPU power and harddrive. But if you just need to load assets from it, like .unity3D files you dont need a EC2 server. Just the S3 is enough. Its cheaper and its only storage. If you need scalablity, you have CloudFront that will cache/distribute your S3 content on different datacenters.
Therefore I am currently designing gameservers (those doing the logic) as EC2 or similar server/services and these will then produce/publish data/assets into the S3 network automatically.
Hope this helps you.
If you need to run the website, I would just rent a simple website on any webhotel for a start and then add a crossdomain file so that you can load .unity3D assetfiles from the S3 network.
Amazon provides a lot of SD$$anonymous$$ and documentation on how to interact with their services. I will recommend you go read them first. :o)
Depending on how you do your save-scripts, you could also just build files with the scores and load them from the server through Unity, as unity can load bytes with WWW function.
$$anonymous$$ySQL will require a server to run the database, Amazon AWS provides a simple X$$anonymous$$L-meta kinda database which is not relational. But should be enough for handling scores and logins. http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
Btw. if you know Dropbox, the free backup/sync software. Their architecture builds upon S3 storage from Amazon AWS. :o) Talking about scaleabilty.
Answer by AdChe · Jul 20, 2011 at 11:29 PM
BerggreenDK,
Thanks for the info! It sounds like I'm doing it backwards then...I've got an EC2 server simply to connect our Asset Server. Do you by chance have a tutorial on that EC2 to S3 interactions?
Also, What about storing player data to present on the website? For example, if I wanted to have a user sign into the website to be able to see current scores of all players. I imagine this to be stored in a MySQL database then presented on a page. Can I get your thoughts on that?
see my comment below my answer. Please note, this type of forum works by "single answers" with multiple comments. 1 answer = solution/idea, so this answer from you does not solve your own question and might get downvoted by community leaving you with bad karma points. :-)
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