Quote:
Originally Posted by DevilDawg
What about speed, however? If we assume you are developing a PHP MMO which may have 500+ people connected simultaneously won't a dedicated server be required to handle the bandwidth? Also you may end up paying for extra bandwidth your users are taking up.
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I would be wary of making "you need a dedicated server when [foo]" statements - your game's needs will dictate what sort of server you need(and if you encounter speed problems, you should benchmark your game to try and figure out where the slowdowns are; dedicated servers are not an instant solution to any problems). If you have 1000 players simultaneously connected but are only serving flat files or cached pages to them, you'll be able to support far more players on a smaller server(or shared hosting) than you would with 25 players connected to pages that are running thousands of calculations.
Bandwidth requirements are also something that vary from game to game - an image heavy game will easily chew through two or more times the amount of bandwidth that a game without images will use - again, it all depends on the specifics of your game. Personally, I have yet to encounter a situation where the amount of bandwidth that a host provided me with wasn't more than enough for what I needed.