I am trying to develop a multiplayer rts game. My question here is: which language is best suited for the server side of that game? My very first choices wolud be lower level languages, such as C++ or Java, but I'm afraid I'll have to pay way more than what I can afford for the hosting of a server app written in said languages. (Can you suggest me a free host for developing (or should I use my home PC?) and a cheap one for the first months of deployment?)
PHP at first seemed ok, but then I realized I needed an idle process running even as no user is connected and no pages are being requested. Although I managed to work around some of the issues related to this problem with AJAX requests, I still feel very limited about what I can do with this language; PLUS, even hosting the server locally with Wamp, I have very limited FPS, and the loop on the client which costantly pools the server does it at very unregular intervals (but this may be fault of the way I wrote the client...). Still, I belive that's not what PHP was meant for.
As regards the client, I'd like my game to be a browsergame, for the sake of semplicity (auto-updates, no dowloads and installations needed, portability), probably written in HTML5 (no complex 3d graphics) or flash, but if I have to fall back to a good old standard app in Java or C++ I guess I'll be fine anyway.