New to Networking

I have a card game that I am building and want to make multi-player over the internet. I have a lot of code written so far, but I want to start working on the networking part of it.

I've been doing a lot of reading and from what I can understand, I have to make the program an Applet in a web page. Then, people can come to my website, start the Applet and it will run on their browser. Is this correct?

I don't have a web page yet. I see that web hosting services offer different features, such as FrontPage server extensions, PHP, CGI, ASP, MySQL databases, etc. My program reads and writes to 3 different Excel Spreadsheets (possibly more) and uses a lot of different images (jpeg's and png's) via JLabels.

Are there any special features I will need from my web host?

Any suggestions or feedback to find a good free web host that fits my needs and doesn't have a lot of advertisements, if possible?

Most free hosting are LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) oriented and offer no
java servlet container.

But if you gonna use Applets you dont even need it.

Simply create some Java applet (avoid using packages for simplicity)
and some html page to call it.

Then copy both html file and java *.class file to your site at same dir.

Run applet through any java enabled browser,
by URL that points to your html file.

I use this free hosting
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Here's example of my simple java applet, no commercials on page :) :
Insert title here

View page src to see mine a.html file
that contains BasicApplet.class in same dir

Code:

---

<applet code="BasicApplet"  width="150" height="200">
 
</applet>

---

Problem for you to solve:
An applet has no access to local system resources unless it is specifically granted the access. Access permission is granted with a policy file.

More about it here:
Observe Applet Restrictions (The Java™ Tutorials > Security Features in Java SE > Quick Tour of Controlling Applets)

good luck!