I am looking to develop an multiplayer game. I identified Openfire as a option for the network communication between players (making moves, results of moves, as well as general chat). However, I am concerned about maintaining my own Openfire server. Are there any public hosts with nominal to free charge? I play on chesspark.com and noticied they use jabber.org. Is this pratical to use a public IM service or do you need set up your own server?
Thanks for your advice
Hey Bill,
Openfire is a good solution for your gaming needs. The server has been used a few times by big companies for the same requirements. It makes sense to me to not host the Openfire server at your home but in some data center. Using a public server like jabber.org is not correct since you can put a lot of traffic on a public site and bring it down. Instead you should search for a hosting service close to where your clients will be and place the Openfire server there. In that case you will pay for the bandwidth that you need and you will be the only one affected if your site goes down due to heavy traffic.
Regards,
– Gato
I’ve done some preliminary searching for OpenFire supported host providers prior to my posting to no avail. Do you know of a site or forum posting comparing/recommending North American hosts specializing in OpenFire support?
Hi Bill,
take a look at http://www.igniterealtime.org/support/service_providers.jsp and maybe also http://www.jivesoftware.com/company/partners/list .
I hope that these lists help.
You can of course run Openfire at home on your own server or notebook if you have a broadband connection. It’s as far as I can tell more reliable than a cheap hosting provider. Then of course you need to take care of hardware failures etc. all by yourself which can be tricky (no more holiday).
LG