[DGD] Pro's and Con's of <insert favorite hosting strategy here>

[Dread Quixadhal]

If I were running a production game, where I actually expected to advertise
and attract players, and I expected them to stick around and actually play
the game, I'd opt for some kind of professional hosting.

In that case, I'd probably prefer to have a virtual machine where I can
install whatever OS I like, and am responsible for what goes on inside it
myself.  I know such services exist, but I have no idea what they cost or
how hard they are to find.

In such a setup, you'd ideally have a single IP address dedicated to your
VM, and you'd probably have some bandwidth cap and some effective CPU (IE:
Take a server with 16 3GHz quad-cores and divide it up amongst 100 users, so
you end up having about a single 1.2GHz CPU after overhead), and some amount
of RAM (make sure this is enough!  256M should be reasonable unless you're a
java person).

The plus side of this is that you never have to touch hardware.  If
something breaks, it's their job to fix it and make sure your VM is
restored.  You might also get a way to obtain a backup of the VM itself,
which might be fun if you wanted to run it locally.

For development though, I don't see the need for more than a couple of ports
forwarded from your firewall to your home machine.  I run mine on an old P3
that sits in the corner and does very little else, and that's mostly so that
I can play games on my desktop and not care if it crashes, or uses 99.99999%
of the CPU, or whatever.  When I'm doing heavy development (IE: lots of
recompiles), I pull of a VM on my desktop so I can compile at 3.0GHz instead
of 900MHz.

For SVN (or whatever repository you like), if it's mostly just you doing
commits, that can sit on a home machine too.  If you have more than one or
two others though, you'll probably want to put it on your hosted
enviornment, otherwise they may have work done and ready to commit but have
to wait for your 25-man Naxx raid to finish.