Disclaimer: I did not get any benefits for writing this article, nor do I want any. It’s a report of my own knowledge and experience with land in virtual worlds, and nothing more. It doesn’t aim to be a test nor comparison of different commercial offers.

Virtual worlds are about land. And ‘land’ is nothing else but server space. If you’ve been in a virtual world for a while, you’ll start to feel at home there, and you’ll want to have a home there. You’ll have acquired virtual goods, and you’ll want to show them somewhere. Or you even created some yourself, and would like other people to see them or possibly buy them. Either way, many residents of virtual worlds want to have at least a small place to call their own.

Thus, it’s no surprise that renting server space is the core business of providers of virtual worlds. In most virtual worlds available, the providers themselves are the only ones you can rent land from, disallowing everyone else from connecting their servers to their grid. As understanding as this is in terms of wanting to control the safety and reliability of their services, that approach won’t further the evolution of virtual worlds. And it is the firm belief of this author, that virtual worlds will, and will have to, be the next step in the evolution of internet, so keeping grids closed would be like ISP’s would allow you to access only content that’s hosted on their own servers and not let anyone host their own server, or let their customers move beyond the limit of their services and look at other offers.

The OSGrid is different in this respect as it allows anyone to connect their own servers (even if it’s a simple home pc) to their grid and run their own regions on it, which leads to an enormous ‘land mass’ in correlation to user numbers. As of the time of this writing, there are 4115 active users and 3916 registered regions on the OSGrid, which means that on the average almost every user has a whole region for themselves.

Now, according to the OpenSimulator Wiki, “setting up OpenSim requires a high level of technical knowledge” which makes it hard to do for the technically uninitiated. Also, if you’re looking for a region that’s supposed to be up 24/7 and should support a fair number of avatars and prims, running it on your home computer may not be the best solution. That’s why there are already several professional companies that offer hosted regions for OpenSimulator environments.

One thing to look out for when chosing a provider for your OpenSim region: The most important resource is RAM, and what draws most from this resource is avatars (and scripts, to some extent). So the arbitrary prim count, that was introduced by LL as a measure of what a region can support, can hardly be a reference to an OpenSimulator region. You’ll probably be able to host an incredibly large number of prims on your region without experiencing a significant drop of performance, whereas avatars visiting can add a lot of load on the server. Right now, there seem to be some memory leaks with the opensim software, which call for restarts in regular intervals (depending on the size of the allocated ram).¹

My own region, Ever 01, is hosted by Snoopy Pfeffer of Dreamland Metaverse. As with many other things, having a region hosted on OSGrid is a different experience from having a region hosted on Second Life. First off, it’s much cheaper². Second, customer service is outstanding, as Snoopy is quite obviously a professional and very engaged in open simulator software. For example she implemented a paypal module for OpenSim which is enabled as standard on her regions. She also personally overlooked the performance of the region and was just as interested in its performance as myself, watching closely its behaviour on a heavy avatar load during our opening party, and taking according steps. It’s a complete contrast to the anonymous and automated process of having a region hosted by LL, needing to file tickets (which get routinely misunderstood or answered with standardized phrases) and getting treated as a nuisance even when you’re spending several thousand dollars a year on them. Additionally, it’s possible to get a backup of your whole region, so all the things you rezzed and created are really yours! Yes, as pathetic as it may be to go crazy over such ordinary concepts, once you spent years in SL with the ever present fear of losing your inventory or creations to a simple server malfunction (and eventually losing it to wet-wired malfunction), this IS an amazing change.

I have no experience with other OpenSim hosting companies yet, but in my most personal and humble opinion, Snoopy offers an excellent service at very reasonable prices (and once I will finally have sold my SL land holdings, I’ll definitely rent another region as a home just for myself). For now, I’m simply a happy resident blissfully building away.

(Deutsche Version)

1. On a personal, non-technical and clueless side note, I wonder if it’s possible to allocate ram dynamically, as it is needed by the regions. [↩]
2. in my case 45 US-$ per month and no setup fee in comparison to 295 US-$ per month and 1000 US-$ setup fee for a private estate in SL [↩]