Shockwave Server hosting (http://www.shockwaveserver.com/) is the hosting partner of SmartFox that provides hosting that has the SmartFoxServer ready for running. The benefit of using it is that we almost do not need to set up anything to plug in the virtual world code and run on the hosting.

We can also apply for the hosting of dedicated server or Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Renting dedicated server or VPS means we have full control of the server that can run anything under the hosting agreement. We can set up the Java Runtime Environment and SmartFoxServer ourselves and configure the port in firewall to get it to work. VPS and dedicated server usually charge from 10 dollars to several hundred dollars depending on the server setting. SmartFoxServer uses around 600 MB-800 MB RAM and I would suggest using the dedicated server hosting that comes with around 1GB RAM or more.

Media Temple (http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/) provides virtual dedicated hosting where users can switch between the $50, $100, and $150 plan at anytime to adapt the usage of the SmartFoxServer.

The Planet (http://www.theplanet.com/) hosting provides dedicated server hosting so that users can choose one of their server configurations and rent the server for several hundred dollars per month.

Another approach is to put our own physical server in the data center. It will be around several hundred per month. The benefit of using our own server is that we can take control of everything, including the hardware configuration. However, it requires more advanced server hosting techniques.

Some data center provides the Apple Mac mini server hosting service. Hosting such as Mac Mini collocation (http://www.macminicolo.net/) and Mac Mini World (http://www.macminiworld.net/) lets users rent a Mac Mini in their data center or ship their own Mac Mini to the data center. The staff will then set up the Mac Mini for the users to remote control them. Beacuse SmartFoxServer can host in Mac OS, it is a nice solution for hosting the server.

Cloud service is a kind of Internet-based computing service that is flexible and scalable at a reasonable price. In contrast to the dedicated server, we are not renting a physical machine. We rent the computing service from the cloud service provider. We can then launch an instance and host the virtual world.

The benefit of the cloud computing service is the flexibility to start/stop the hosting and scale up or down at any time. The cloud service provides charge only on the up time of the instance. That means we can launch the SmartFoxServer for several hours for testing in development and we only pay for that several hours instead of a whole month. After deploying the server in production, we can choose from charge per minute or charge per month.

Rackspace Cloud (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) are two cloud service providers. They both provide similar pricing and features.

There is a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image with SmartFoxServer Pro set up in Ubuntu OS. We can use this image in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

The three approaches come with their own advantages and different requirements on administrating the hosting. The following table compares the three hosting solutiona: