Hey everyone! I've been a long time lurker but only just created an account now :)

Anyway, to the point. I'm creating a turn-based multiplayer game with a dedicated server as the host. I'm Australian which means that my internet is not capable of really handling any hosting, and I would prefer not to keep my computer on for days on end.

So what I'm asking for is if anyone knows of any VPS services or low-cost dedicated server hosting which would suit my very low bandwidth needs for the purpose of testing this game during development.

The game will not be available to the public so I can only expect between 5 - 10 connections concurrently. Being turn based, the game also uses very little bandwidth. The reason I'm asking for suggestions is due to a lot of VPS hosts explaining in their ToS that game servers are not allowed. Operating System does not particularly matter since my dedicated server runs on Mono and works on Linux. Or at least, I've tried it on Ubuntu 14 64-Bit and it works :P

Any help is much appreciated. I'm not really sure what price range I am expecting here, so I can't give any budget limitations I'm afraid.

I haven't used it myself, but Amazon.com's servers are cheap, and you aren't paying by monthly usage or anything, you're paying by actual usage. So you can have your stuff running for only a few hours a day, only on the days you need it. Apparently they have a free tier, even, if you're using less than a certain amount of resources.

Supposedly it's harder to get things set up though, because they do alot less hand-holding. If you do manage to get it setup, then it's a good long-term host as well, because of Amazon's economy of scale and intense competition with Google and Microsoft, their up-time and costs and supposed to be really good.

The first year of Amazon Web Services, you get one micro instance for free, and some amount of bandwidth.
After that, it'll cost you something like $20/month.
We use Amazon at work for a variety of things, but not for our main hosting (we can run 1000 servers much cheaper than Amazon would charge us for the same.)

Another option is interserver.net, which has $6/month virtual server instances, which comes with sufficient bandwidth to host downloading as well as the game itself for many small games like you're describing.
I once used this to spin up 100 separate instances, to simulate a DDoS on ourselves :-)

Other options include Azure (Microsoft's server cloud,) and Rackspace, and Linode. Those are generally slightly more expensive per month, though.
I have not used those for much of anything.

All prices US :-)