I've got a few years of experience with the fundamentals of the BSD socket API, and LAMP servers in general. It really interests me, and I've built some little "online game" projects. With that said, if I wanted to build a matchmaking server for a game I'm working on, I'd probably build the matchmaking server as a daemon in C using BSD sockets on my configured LAMP server, then use Apache + PHP to form a login system for my game client to allow players to log into their accounts that are stored on a MySQL database. This is what I've done in the past for school projects, and one game I launched years ago.

Now, assuming that this is a practical approach, what would be a decent service for hosting my matchmaking server publicly? I'm thinking that a cloud service would be best where I have access to my own virtual machine. Once the VM's hardware specs are defined, I'd set it up as a LAMP server, upload my production build of my matchmaking server, as well as the the database and PHP scripts.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a cheap-ish cloud-based solution where I'd have access to my own VM?

I've looked at Amazon and Rackspace before posting, but hplus0603 has given me some great leads I'd like to check out! Amazon looks like it's got quite a bit of tools, but I'm pretty new at this, and it'd be way too much tech to start out with. Especially since it looks like pricing can be high and complicated to figure out.

Felix brought up a really good point about CPU and memory. I could predict how much memory would be needed based on connections (typically program overhead + approximately 48 bytes per connection), but then there's the CPU... Also, how would cloud systems handle thousands of connections. Say, 10,000 users were connected to my VM on the cloud, and I'm iterating through them constantly trying to create matches, then idling when there are none, how does VM manage so many connections at once? I understand that each connection would have its own socket handle, but how would the virtual network card/OS stack up against so many connections with a VM cloud environment? I'd think it'd do better than a bare-metal server sitting in my room lol.

Would Ubuntu Server or Free BSD be the way to go for my VM's OS? Btw, I checked out www.interserver.net, and it's looking pretty good to me. Will I have full access to my VM so I could build and run software on it, configure a LAMP server, etc? I noticed that it mentioned you could install dashboards like cPanel on it, but it looks optional.

Haha, I like your thinking. I always thought that'd be difficult. I was just watching a video on the PS4 unboxing where one of the Sony engineers was talking about the PS4 having a second low-power CPU just to handle network traffic. They'll have their own custom Linux-based firmware, so I was wondering how a typical desktop VM like Ubuntu Desktop (not server) would stack up.

The only network programming I've done are BSD sockets, which I find fun, but there is quite a bit of babysitting going on there. I've learned from some research that games typically rely exclusively exclusively on UDP "connections" instead of reliable TCP sockets (even in P2P file sharing protocols) because TCP's reliability can be emulated with UDP pretty well. I've wanted to experiment with the enet library, but I just haven't dived into that yet.

Does it now? I was thinking about that last year, but over the Spring this year, I was reading up on how games typically use UDP exclusively. In fact, having a TCP connection could actually slow down UDP. This, of course, sounds interesting when considering that the computer's/device's OS usually has many ports open for various processes --both TCP and UDP. I always thought that using UDP for updating player positions/animation states would be the best way to go, but then use TCP for important events, such as getting a kill in a deathmatch, firing a weapon, change in health, etc.