Deploying a real-time multiplayer game on Railway

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I build Old Light, a real-time strategy game that runs in the browser. Claim stars, grow an economy, send fleets, all while other players and NPC empires do the same. The second a build finishes or a fleet lands, the server pushes it to every connected client over a WebSocket.

That last part, a long-lived server holding an open socket, rules out most of the usual hosts. Here's what it ruled in.

Why not Vercel or Netlify

Serverless shines when your backend is stateless functions. It's the wrong shape the moment you need a socket that stays open: socket.io wants one process that lives for the whole session, and serverless boots per request and then freezes. You can bolt on a managed WebSocket service, but that's a second system to run and pay for.