[Flash] Calling all multiplayer developers!

[combatking0]

I'm just testing the waters here - I'm not advertising anything, nor is this ready.

I have been looking into developing online multiplayer flash games. In order to be played in real time, XMLsockets are required to be used.

The lowest price I have found so far for a server which supports this is £120 per year, which is a little bit more than I am willing to pay for.

If there is enough interest, I will develop the necessary Flash and PHP templates, and rent out 150MB portions of the server space and port ranges (2000 ports each) for £5 per year per game.

If successful, we could see all sorts of types of multiplayer games available.

My question is, does this sound a reasonable price to pay to run a multiplayer online game?

[benny!]

@ck0:
That's defintely an interesting topic. I also think that the popularity
of mmo flash games will grow in future. Since I did not do any research
about server prizes and I have no spare time to dive into mmo programming
atm - I cannot judge if this prize is ok ...

[combatking0]

Hopefully the price tag will be well within the price range of anybody looking for a basic hosting package, but it would be targetted at multiplayer flash developers.

150MB can be difficult to fill unless you have a massive database or are putting lots of files up for download.

2000 ports is excessive, but there are plenty go go round. I might impose a lower limit than this, in case there is enough interest to warrant a larger server. The total number of ports won't change, and 64 or 128 ports should still be more than most people will require, but this is negotiable.

I might take this question to a flash specific forum - I may have read somewhere that somebody was looking for a low price hosting package, but found the prices at the time to be too high.

[edit]
The above is based on sharing the Xilo XV1 service amongst 32 people.

However, I just found the SWVPS LVPS-1 service, which has double the storage space and monthly bandwidth of the above for a little bit less than the Xilo package.

I'll check the customer feedbacks and reviews before making a descision.

[Jim]

Supporting 30+ sites a year for 5 quid each sounds like a nightmare.  Work it out at your hourly rate - you wouldn't want to spend more than half an hour on it for a fiver.

Jim

[combatking0]

True, but if I can find a secure way to give the other 31 webmasters access to their own seperate home folders, it shouldn't be too much trouble.

It would cause a problem if a large number of them decided not to carry on with it though, but I think £5 per year should be low enough to tempt anybody tired of the ads on free hosting services like Geocities to want to give it a try.

£10 per year for 16 sites is still tempting though.

Does anybody else run a Virtual Private Server? Is it easy, and if not, what sort of skills are needed?