Well, I'm creating a mini forum, and I've come to the conclusion that the best way to build this forum is by using real-time applications. But for now, I host my site on a free server (like hostinger), and so far I've only heard of Node.js with web socket to create this kind of application, and as far as I can tell, it does not work in the conventional way (before I just programmed in localhost with Xampp, and if it worked I used the FileZilla server and I saw the modification giving an f5 on the site, but apparently node.js only works with VPS servers. some way to make a realtime website without a VPS server?
I'm currently using PHP, Mysql and JQuery.