Thank you for the response.

 By address space I mean the given ip address from the web hosting provider. I was under the impression that java would treat this routing the same from the application side independent of hosting provider (for example, "298.181.23.243", username, sha1 encrypted password) into some java api that establishes authetnication as I have done with web applications in the past. So i guess I should start with what web hosting service is cheap enough to accommodate a simple java program whose sole purpose is to authenticate and poll actions that refresh the form during turns  and do I need a java web hosting service?

Hope this clarifies, if not, I'll figure it out maybe.

Essentially, I'm just gonna have to buy a java web hosting service and figure it out it sounds like because there are too many differences between server configurations as they relate to authentication/processing from the application layer. Like I said before, I've done this with web applications and a java web hosting service, but it was provided through my university, so it was abstracted from my need to know how it worked, rather, just knowing the functions that leveraged the communication protocol. Similarly, my mentor at my place of work was part of a software project team for his program where this was abstracted from his knowledge(someone else coded it), but essentially it was the same process.

For example, some_connection_Method(ipaddressofserver, username, sha1password) which is what I'm aiming for.

Thank you for helping me scope my issue further though it's much appreciated through this seemingly simple process.

Generally these days I just use VM's on general cloud hosts for most things (e.g. EC2 on Amazon Web Services) that is not a simple static website or maybe PHP (and I'll likely migrate those at some point to EC2 and S3).

Low power Linux  nodes are pretty cheap, and there is free trails for basic ones, and they have everything you need for online services and scaling up to some really big sizes as needed.