I’m a little confused when it comes to socket servers in terms of deploying it online.
Running locally is fine as most tutorials get you to make a server application and a client application which I can execute. Done all that for awhile now and I’m happy with it but now I want to try it using a web host.
How would I deploy the socket server to my web host and then run the server? do I just upload the program to the server and run http://www.mywebpage.com/mysocketserver (assuming the program is called mysocketserver.exe)
may sound like a stupid question but I’m having one of those brain dead moments.
[Edit]
Great answers guys thank you. Shame I can only mark one as the answer.
Most hosting services are website related: you upload your website to their server and the host takes care of provisioning the application.
However you haven’t written a website that is served by a web server, but a socket server, which is more akin to the web server itself that runs a website.
As a result you will need a host that will allow you to install and run applications, such as a Virtual Private Server service, rent a physical server or use a cloud service such as Amazon EC2.
You usually Remote Desktop or SSH into the server you are renting (or own) to upload and start the application either as a normal application, a Service or a Daemon.
Once you have installed your socket server on the host server and started the application running you should be able to contact your service using the IP address for your server and the port that you are running your socket server on.
For example, if your ip address is 10.0.0.1 and you’ve written your socket server to listen on port 1234, you should be able to contact your service at address 10.0.0.1:1234.
Take into account firewalls allowing access to that port.
You will also then be able to use a DNS service such as DynDns to assign a domain name to that ip address.