Question

1. I’m building a site that uses web sockets (technically Flash sockets) in order to provide real-time communication.
2. I want to be able to support people behind corporate/academic firewalls that block everything except port 80
3. I’d like to be able to run the site off of a single machine

Previously, I’ve been using Apache for HTTP serving combined with some python listening on a high-numbered socket for the websocket stuff, but that obviously won’t work here.

I can always move the websocket stuff to a separate server, but I’d like to avoid paying for a second VPS (and have to talk to the database over the network instead of locally). Is there a good way to do this (nodejs, nginx, ..?), or is it not worth the headache?

Answer 1

• http://code.google.com/p/pywebsocket/
• What popular webservers have support for HTML5 WebSocket?
• https://serverfault.com/questions/201825/how-would-i-configure-a-websocket-server-to-run-alongside-a-webserver

Another possibility is to use mod_proxy in apache to redirect the requests to a websocket server.