Web chat with PHP/JQuery and push technology (Only for a small group of users, shared hosting)
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I'm working on a small private site for a group of 10 people. It's essentially a tiny social network just for us. We currently also use Windows Live Messenger for real-time chatting but we're looking to create an alternative since the MSN clients out there for Mac, Linux and smartphones do not support the recently added group features in MSN, which we use.

I've been reading up a little on push technology to see how I'd go about creating a web based chat room that suits our very limited needs. I gather that Apache is not really suited for long polling at all, and that using something like APE would be a better idea. However, we're running on a fairly cheap but very good shared host so we simply don't have the ability to install any server side software.

To my question.

Since we are, after all, just a handful of users, and most of the time only half of us will be online, is is likely that simple PHP long polling could work? The chat is going to be open pretty much every day from early afternoon to late at night, but not all users will be active all the time. Still, on average probably five or six users will be online without leaving for a whole day, every day. When we're the most active, there will be times when *a lot* of messages are sent in a short period of time, but it's hard to estimate how many.

Would it be worth looking into the use of Websockets using the PHP server implementation of those and with a Flash fallback (for desktop use we're fine since we all use Chrome, basically, but we'd be happy to be able to use Android devices as well).

I also stumbled upon www.pusher.com and their free alternative looks quite suitable, with 20 connections and 100 000 messages per day (we won't nearly reach that much even in a week). Would you recommend we simply go down that road instead?

I know there are loads of questions here regarding push technology with PHP and Apache, but I haven't found anything addressing a situation where there will be such limited use of the application. Any tips and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I pretty much know how I'd write the chat itself, I just need to know the best method to use, and if any of the above will work.