It depends on how deep you want to go yourself. At its easiest you could just drop Playtomic [1] in, we have support for most gaming platforms.... obviously I'm quite biased towards this option. :)
If you want something more flexible and you're doing mobile you can check out Parse [2], they're a custom database with a REST, iOS and Android APIs. If you're using Flash, HTML5 or Unity3d we have a bridge that lets you use Parse through our own APIs.
If you want to get right down to the guts of it I would get a simple Heroku [3], PHPFog [4] or AppHarbor [5] account depending on what languages you're most comfortable with or learning and set up a MongoDB database over at MongoHQ [6], MongoDB lends itself very well to user created levels in my experience.
Basically you need:
1) Scripts to save, rate, count plays and list levels. You want to either authenticate the user, or more simply just obfuscate the data you're transmitting to make tampering harder
2) Some kind of logging or queueing system where you will store the plays
3) Something that will go through your logs or queues and perform the $inc operations on your levels in bulk batches rather than doing it all individually
4) Indexes on your database that match your listing requirements
If you want something more flexible and you're doing mobile you can check out Parse [2], they're a custom database with a REST, iOS and Android APIs. If you're using Flash, HTML5 or Unity3d we have a bridge that lets you use Parse through our own APIs.
If you want to get right down to the guts of it I would get a simple Heroku [3], PHPFog [4] or AppHarbor [5] account depending on what languages you're most comfortable with or learning and set up a MongoDB database over at MongoHQ [6], MongoDB lends itself very well to user created levels in my experience.
Basically you need:
1) Scripts to save, rate, count plays and list levels. You want to either authenticate the user, or more simply just obfuscate the data you're transmitting to make tampering harder
2) Some kind of logging or queueing system where you will store the plays
3) Something that will go through your logs or queues and perform the $inc operations on your levels in bulk batches rather than doing it all individually
4) Indexes on your database that match your listing requirements
[1] http://playtomic.com/ [2] http://parse.com/ [3] http://heroku.com/ [4] http://phpfog.com/ [5] http://appharbor.com/ [6] http://mongohq.com/