Apache Game Server

I'm designing my game server for a mobile game. I have no experience with client-server development.

Main functions of my server:
1. I need a server which can exchange with my mobile client text messages and small files.
2. I want it to be able to send and receive procedurally generated email.
3. I need server-side scripting which allows generating some files procedurally and performing various calculations.
4. My game uses F2P business model with microtransactions and I need to track this on my server.
5. I also plan to store player profiles on the server. These profiles will be XML files.

I don't plan to host gameplay sessions on the server. The server should be able to maintain thousands of connections at once. Initially I thought about implementing this as a normal Unity program. Can this be done alternatively using Apache web server? Can I accomplish what I need using only HTTP protocol? What are my other major options? I never coded a game server before.

 

If your server do not hosts gameplay matches, then you right doing it in unity makes no sense. Apache is not top performant web server. I suggest you to use some third party CDN for static files and nginx + nodejs for server scripting. It's easy to learn and afaik most performant solution available in that class. If you want to keep homogenous environment and easy xml serialization, then look at IIS + WCF. Not so fast, but its c# and full power of .net at your hands.