I am building a website that will be handling many persistent connections - either through long polling or WebSockets (if I get a host that has IIS8). My question is, are either of these viable on a shared host? Or do I need a true dedicated server?
I understand that long-polling will require me to do some custom configuration on the maximum number of requests handled by the server.. so it seems like this is not an option on a shared host. What about WebSockets? And, will either of these work with "virtual" or "cloud" hosting?
If you want or need to use a shared host then you could offload the handling of the persistent connections to a realtime web hosted service. I work for one such company, Pusher, but there are a few others out there too (all linked to from the guide above).