Question

I’ve been developing a Silverlight-c# client-server game that has now gotten to the point that it should be hosted for a small amount of people can test it out. The problem is that I’ve never looked at windows hosting before an am thus a total noob. I’m looking for a place that allows me to run a c# command line program (the game server), and allows me to open non-standard ports for communication. Since this is only for testing, I’m going for min specs etc.

Answer 1

If you want raw hosting as you described, Amazon cloud, as Paul said, is probably your best bet. However… given that you are doing a C#/Silverlight application, I would suggest that you highly consider Azure for your hosting, as it scales rather nicely and the free trial is a great way to test.

You will likely have to refactor aspects of your server to do this. But you would have had to do that anyway, since hosting of servers in a console is an unstable choice — at a minimum you would have wanted to use a Windows Service for your game server if only for the auto-start option.