There is a wide swath of providers. You could keep it easy to start with something like Linode or Digital Ocean, or you could go with Google Cloud or AWS.

Is your game server going to need to do anything besides present the game? If so I would consider a second server for the game server logic. It'll also help with partitioning resources. Properly setup, your website probably won't need much more than the specs of a Linode 1GB server that goes for $5 USD. A game server may need more.

GameDev.net's main servers are with LiquidWeb, but we'll be moving away from them in the coming months in favor of Google Cloud. We considered and evaluated AWS, but GCloud just makes more sense as a service for us plus our cost estimates led to it being less expensive. We also have a Linode VPS and a Digital Ocean VPS, so we're familiar with all of these. DO is "easy", but I have noticed network performance isn't as good as the others. We don't use Linode for anything strenuous so I can't comment on their performance.

Having said that, there are smaller cloud providers that might be a better option to keep costs low. You might want to consider those as a startup phase, and then when you're ready to scale up go with one of the larger providers. We actually advertise for several here on GameDev.net, so keep your eye out for those banners.

Hello everyone.

I'm currently working on a browser game using THREE.js library and node.js as the server.

I'm wanting to host the server on a virtual machine, from what I've researched, it seems virtual machines are the way to go.

Can anyone recommend a virtual machine provider? Are they're any companies I should stay away from?

Also, I'm wanting to host a website. Registered users can both play the game or contribute to a community forum.

I will be creating and hosting the website on the same virtual machine.

Does anyone know of an open source forum module, or something like that, that could make having a forum in my website easier?

Thanks everyone

If your site is small (hobby stuff), then you can use the docker based redhat openshift cloud. They give free hosting for alot of different techonologies. And they provide an SSL certificate (required if you want to use facebook). All for free.

If you want bigger stuff, I use google compute engine, as it is really cheap for sustained usage. I pay ~5$ a month for a tiny but fully fledged VM server instance.

At work we use amazon because of their awesome APIs, but they are expensive for small projects the last time I checked.