Ahh! Well, it depends on how many simultaneous users you're planning on supporting. It sounds to me like you're thinking hobbyist mud size, so say, 150 simultaneous at max? Does that sound reasonable?
In that case if you wrote an efficient server you could do a shared account with Wolfpaw.net. For $28.99/month you can have unlimited players and 400 megs of space. I highly recommend Wolfpaw, in fact. We spend tens of thousands/year in hosting and bandwidth costs and I've not encountered another mud hosting service that can compete.
Now, that's the server cost. The big killer if you're going to host a game with a fair amount of players will be bandwidth costs. That tens of thousands/year I mentioned above is largely for bandwidth.
--matt
|