I'm making a turn based online multiplayer game (matches are 1v1) where information needs to be pushed to clients every 5-10 seconds. Now from my experience and reading the best way to do this is through a server program I build with Java for example and run on a dedicated server. The only problem is because I'm young (17) I don't have money to support a thing like that. My client will be Java and my server in PHP on a Linux-Apache webserver.
From here should I use long polling to communicate to clients or should I try to use sockets?