I am going to sign up for a domain name with Go Daddy and they offer a hosting package with either Windows or Linux. I am working on an online TCG game that will use a web server to handle log ins and connecting players to one another. Which option should I choose, or it doesn’t really matter.
More important than Linux or Windows is making sure that you have a VPS. Shared servers typically don’t play well with XOJO web apps. With GoDaddy, the lower cost options are most often shared servers. Make sure what you get with your choice of plan.
I would also suggest to look at XOJO-friendly hosting services. Xojo Cloud and 1701 Hosting come to mind. Either solution is used by many forum members.
I have been using 1701 since 2013. It is Linux based and the service is outstanding. Phillip Zedalis is a member of this forum and uses Xojo. It counts when you need assistance.
I know some members use Go Daddy, but choosing them or any other standard host means you will be on your own to install and support your Xojo Web apps, since their support has no idea what Xojo is. I had a rather unpleasant experience in the past like that with people who did not know duck about Xojo and cared even less.
You may want to check these threads :
https://forum.xojo.com/conversations/all?search="go%20daddy"
One of my servers is a VPS at GoDaddy running CentOS 6. It has performed flawlessly and I have been extremely happy with it. But as the others have said, you have to be ready to do some configuration. If you are not comfortable installing 32 bit libraries, httpd, mysqld or setting up your firewall, etc… then I wouldn’t recommend it. Phillip is ready to go with Xojo, and of course, xojo cloud is built-in.
WeLoveServers had awesome VPS services. Great prices and 100% uptime. Ubuntu 32/64 bit virtual servers take less than a minute to get up and running and don’t require any libraries like CentOS to get web apps running. The ram is misleading though, as each plan only shows half of what you actually get (which is odd from a sales point of view). I have the OVZ 1536 plan for development and have almost 4GB ram, 3.7 Gigahertz Intel Xeon E3 quad processors… Space can be adjusted as needed but starts at 80GB for $10/month and is cheap to increase if needed. The cheapest plan is $4/month and is equivalent to Xojo’s $49/month. Even at $4/month its perfect for medium sized business apps… can’t beat that! There’s also session regeneration and load balancing tools to make scaling large web applications only take minutes, with no ‘setup’ needed. Even with large concurrent app usage, I’ve never seen the processors spike above 7% with only one VM instance running and load balancing disabled. Out of all the VPS services I’ve tried, even the ‘Xojo optimized’ ones, WeLoveServers so far, in my opinion, is the best in speed, management, ease-of-use, price, and quality. In 3 years, we’ve had one application online 100% of the time with not one second missed by an offline state. A number of our clients’ apps run on WLS services and there have been no complications thus-far.
I prefer Linux servers as the majority of Web services and “power” apps are powered by Linux. As of 2009, 90% of desktop/laptops were powered by windows. While 88.6% of the world’s web servers and super computers were powered by Linux. IIS on Windows can be difficult to configure if you haven’t already worked with one; meanwhile Linux servers have a smaller learning curve.
I recommend setting up a VPS VM on a local machine and playing around with both linux and windows servers for a few days to see what works best for you. TurnKey has an excellent server stack for VMs… literally download, run it, fill in the blanks, and you’re up and running.
I personally would avoid services like BlueHost and GoDaddy if it’s your first server experience with web apps. Their configuration is timely and troublesome without prior experience.
[quote=196115:@Matthew Combatti]WeLoveServers had awesome VPS services. Great prices and 100% uptime. Ubuntu 32/64 bit virtual servers take less than a minute to get up and running and don’t require any libraries like CentOS to get web apps running. The ram is misleading though, as each plan only shows half of what you actually get (which is odd from a sales point of view). I have the OVZ 1536 plan for development and have almost 4GB ram, 3.7 Gigahertz Intel Xeon E3 quad processors… Space can be adjusted as needed but starts at 80GB for $10/month and is cheap to increase if needed. The cheapest plan is $4/month and is equivalent to Xojo’s $49/month. Even at $4/month its perfect for medium sized business apps… can’t beat that! There’s also session regeneration and load balancing tools to make scaling large web applications only take minutes, with no ‘setup’ needed. Even with large concurrent app usage, I’ve never seen the processors spike above 7% with only one VM instance running and load balancing disabled. Out of all the VPS services I’ve tried, even the ‘Xojo optimized’ ones, WeLoveServers so far, in my opinion, is the best in speed, management, ease-of-use, price, and quality. In 3 years, we’ve had one application online 100% of the time with not one second missed by an offline state. A number of our clients’ apps run on WLS services and there have been no complications thus-far.
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Thanks for the recommendations.
I’m not using Web Apps. I don’t even know what a VPS is. I just need a way for people to sing-up with a user name and password and then sign in using that when running my game so players can connect to one another. The game itself will be written in RealBasic.
I have zero understanding with this apart from some basic HTML knowledge. Most of this web talk is Greek to me.
If you haven’t worked out how to handle the user connection code yet, I would suggest working on that first and worrying about the VPS stuff later. There are a lot of issues with connecting users to each other. You have to figure out how to handle NAT across routers for one thing. It’s not going to be as simple as listening on a port and knowing what that port is.
I am looking for a simple way for players to find each other online and play against one another. I don’t even know what a VPS is. Everything I am being told is all Greek to me. I need to be told explicitly what all this stuff is and why I need it. Remember that I am a newbie at this networking stuff. Up to now, all I’ve ever done is offline code with the occasional download file piece.
Well, I would say to totally forget the server aspect until you have working LAN code. At least by that point you should have a better idea of what’s required for the online server code. Depending on what your game does you may need to deal with a whole new range of issues trying to allow play over the internet. First things first. 
As an aside, I moved away from GoDaddy. I set up my names at namecheap now. I like the company better, and they have a better interface IMO. I also make use of their free dynamic dns for my own domain names so I don’t need to use noip or dyndns if I need to have a name connected to a dynamic IP somewhere.
My game is a TCG game based on the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG. Most of the game is each player takes their turn with the possibility of the opponent countering the turn player’s move.
I notice you have been after that issue for quite a while. In previous threads, after being told how difficult it was to connect machines directly, you seemed to understand that a server was the solution. I believe it is. But you will have to learn at least how a web app works so you can develop the interface to have gamers connect to it.
You can probably do it without a Xojo Web app with the ServerSocket http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/Serversocket but there again you will need to learn. See the two ServerSocket projects in the Communication/Internet examples : server and client. I am afraid such apps would not run on plain run of the mill rental Linux servers since they usually have no user interface. Maybe Windows Server will support Xojo Windows apps, but that is not certain.
You can explore the basic possibilities of server and client on one machine by building each project. Maybe after experimenting a little, you will be comfortable enough to go further. At this time, choosing a server OS seems a bit premature IMHO.