as promised last night, here are my experiences with four OpenSim deployments. with OpenSim, you can be hosted or host it yourself. with a hosted option, you can have your own private grid or be part of a community
no one answer is right for everybody and that is a wonderful reason for moving from Second Life to OpenSim – options
when we first went to OpenSim, subQuark decided on Reaction Grid. Jokay had just been served her Take Down Notice from Linden Lab and went with a grid that has a reputation for being PG with an education and business-focus
our first foray into Reaction Grid was as a private 4 sim grid. subQuark had been a huge moral support to me for my estate in Second Life and often used parcels for his eLearning conferences. now the roles were reversed, i was burned out from the SL land business and wanted nothing more to do with paying for virtual worlds. subQuark continued to believe in the education possibilities of virtual worlds and that he would find a good outlet for his teaching passion. it took a few months but the current vision we are working towards took shape
during this time we moved from being a private grid in Reaction Grid to being a part of their main grid and expanded from 4 sims to 16 sims. being part of their main grid exposed us to more educators
1) with Reaction Grid we tried out the 4 region private grid package called the Mars Mission
- $75 per month (this is the ed discount)
- $220 setup fee (also the ed discount)
- 1 cpu core
- 1 gig RAM (i think)
- 10 megs disk space
2) when we moved to their grid and 16 regions, we added the Nitro-Pack plan:
- $175 a month
- additional one time $150 setup fee
- 2 cpu cores
- 1.5 gig RAM
- 25 megs disk space
due to building issues (lots of building), we then moved on to SimHost. i had suggested SimHost to subQuark initially a year ago (because i am soooo smart). SimHost is run by Adam Frisby and James Stallings II. Adam is one of the core OpenSim developers and James is an administrator on the OSGrid. SimHost donates the server that runs the welcome sim on OSGrid. SimHost has an easy-to-use and no nonsense website. it lays out what you get in a similar fashion to a website hosting company and it gives you more hardware for the money
coming from paying $2,920 a month in tiers to Linden Lab meant that i understood that you get what you pay for (generally speaking). and subQuark’s freelance experience and eLearning work (MOODLE too) also had him in the frame of mind that you pay for quality hosting
so looking at hosted OpenSim at under $200 a month seemed like a bargain, and also very fair, to both of us. subQuark is not looking for a cheap solution, he is looking for a solid and dependable solution
3) with SimHost, we have a private 16 region grid called their Standard Dedicated package
- $189.95 per month (talk to James if you are an educator *wink*)
- $50 setup fee
- 4 cpu cores
- 8 gig RAM
- 500 meg disk space
these are the hosted options we have used, but with OpenSim, you can install your own too
if you are savvy, you could get your own dedicated server from someone like Cari.net and install it yourself (or hire someone to install it). we looked at this option, but could not come close to the price offered by SimHost (it would have cost an extra $100 a month and we would have no support and no James! ener <3 james)
4) installing OpenSim yourself – my experience with this is limited to installing OpenSim on a USB drive. but i must say that it was much easier to install than i thought (using Roger’s awesome instructions for the Diva Distribution). and performance wise, well it is a USB stick! but i could certainly build on it without frustration. in fact, all the builds i have done for subQuark over the last 9 months could have been done on this stick! i have imported the four most heavily built-up regions from our SimHost grid and all the scripts work and i get 50-64 frames per second using the viewer i also installed on the stick! (viewer set to max graphics with 512 metre draw distance and 4x antialias)
if you are a school, university, or not-for-profit that has their own servers, i would highly recommend going this route. the cost would be that incurred by your IT department. from what i see of my two week daily usage of the stick, it needs no maintenance. Crista Lopes has created her Diva Distribution in such a manner that she makes it easy to apply OpenSim version updates (also her 6 easy step install instructions). she is a fantastic, talented, and passionate person about OpenSim and also a core developer
so there you have a snapshot into my experience
my additional perspective (lol, my two cents) – as an educator (i do eLearning stuff part of the time now and taught secondary and college for a few years) and former Second Life person (non-educational use inSL) i heartily recommend SimHost for a hosted solution. if you are looking for other educators to hang out with, then Reaction Grid’s main grid may work for you. but they no longer offer individual sims. in my experience, don’t expect their $75 a month package to act like a Second Life sim. our $175 a month setup was more on par to one Second Life sim and would have been better if left at 4 regions and not 16. i rebooted the server every single time i built and crashed if 4 or 5 people were on with me
learning that a sim in OpenSim is really a region and not the same as an SL sim was major for my happiness in OpenSim
our SimHost package is a dedicated server with 16 instances of OpenSim running on it. roughly speaking, one core and one gig of RAM is about what one Second Life sim is (but remember that inventory, users, grid, asset, and messaging is not on your RAM inSL, it’s spread out over dedicated servers so it does not impact your sim so much). understanding this then helps me to understand why i had poor performance in Reaction Grid. we had 14,180 prims and 311 scripts running – something an SL sim could easily do. but . . . we also had 4 instances of OpenSim running and 16 regions, all using up that 1.5 gig of RAM. knowing that will help your initial experience
our SimHost settup is double the cores and 5 times the RAM, so of course it runs better (derr) and is roughly the same as 4 SL sims. it runs incredibly well and what you don’t see in looking only at hardware is the support you get. Reaction Grid is very good and Chris Hart knows her stuff and is an OpenSim expert (i do miss her, she was wonderful)
James (SimHost) not only built our server but went beyond with installing Apache for us, and setting up the server to be on our own domain. this is a subtle difference that won’t affect much for most people. it means that the server can also be our website. James also has created custom tools for us, like a nifty in-world OAR generator. James and Adam are 100% into OpenSim and it shows. Reaction Grid seems to be more focused on Jibe now
i know this comes across as a SimHost lovefest and when i was in Reaction Grid i sung their praises (it is the number two most used search term for hits to this blog) but OpenSim, to me, is about community and shared goals to an extent. with James, i know that my glowing reviews of him are well appreciated because he takes the time to mention that in emails – it is a true partnership and it is hard to place a price on that =)
whatever you decide – hosted or self-hosted – it is incumbent upon you to research and evaluate the options that are best for you
my heart goes out to the educators and not-for-profits that had the rug pulled out from under them. you are among a small group of people that are reaching out to others with a wonderfully immersive tool to help teach kids, help people deal with mobility issues, do therapy, and genuinely make the world a better place *crud, here go the water works*
i wish there was an easy path for you and i hope you continue your noble and valiant endeavors – namas te
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6 Oct 10 at 10:34 pm
oh, a resource i meant to add – for hosting providers, Maria keeps a great up-to-date list here: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/
Ener Hax
6 Oct 10 at 11:34 pm
I wrestled with this reply for a long time before posting as I like James and honestly don’t wish Simhost bad things, but when I see a review such as this which could convince some of the new SL edu refugees to host there I think a balancing viewpoint could have some merit. My simhost experience is shown here
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2010/04/server-crash-backup-failure-destroys-aesthetica-build/
I hope as they state in the article they have strengthened their backup systems now – I would hate anyone else to go through the sense of loss me and my creative partners went through after losing that 5 months of work. I continue to host my corporate sims with Dreamland Metaverse and have had nothing but flawless and excellent service from Snoopy.
Lee Oldrich
7 Oct 10 at 2:03 am
hi Lee, yes, i know of that issue and it was a real shame. i even posted on it at that time stating that i thought efforts should have been undertaken to attempt to recover the data
that said, i also understand very well as someone who has worked online for a decade that it is always incumbent upon me to take care and take responsibility for my work (indeed, i am the one that must take responsibility for my life)
that is one reason i mentioned the in-world OAR maker. no system is fool-proof and i will do my best to never let a system make a fool of me
being upset with promises that were not kept and crying about it is a bit like saying the dog ate my homework. i know i am being rather black and white, even confrontational, but we all must take responsibility for what we engage with
that includes people who are all surprised that Linden Lab does any of the things it does
to them i say if you don’t like it, make your own world! (not yelling at you, i am on my soapbox)
that said, if I had said “you are guaranteed a backup”, then I would deliver on that. but i also know that some things are out of my control and would have said that i make backups and ideally for 99.9% of the cases, those backups should be there. i would never be so absolute and would always say that you need to make backups too
i hope that after your experience, you make and store your own backups and do so both at home and other locations (i have an external hard drive at home, at subQuark’s home, and my car
i do exports of my more time consuming builds as i make them. my silly lift truss bridge has half a dozen versions saved. those all get backed up with rebit software and that external HD gets cloned to two others (i realy should use the freeware out there that writes automatically to a server since i have unlimited storage)
am i paranoid? probably, but my work is that important to me =)
my glowing review is based on my experience and my expectations. while it’s nice that SimHost promises they keep me safe, the lottery commission also promises that i have a chance to win
i am not criticizing you and feel terrible for your loss but i also think that people need to protect themselves first and let other people’s promises be just that – promises
Ener Hax
7 Oct 10 at 8:44 am
Thanks for the considered response to this. Let me address a couple of points though:
If you read the article it mentions I was promised backups which never appeared, and as I had no access to the console for my sim I could not make them myself, so the lecture on backups and responsibility falls on rather jaded ears at this point. I fail to see how i can be responsible for not having a backup when i had no access to make one, and those I requested did not appear as promised. You could argue of course that over 5 months of not receiving these that i should have been more concerned, but I was assuaged by the promise of “rock solid backup systems so everything was perfectly safe”. When it was revealed that these systems had completely failed, I did whilst any other business person would do. Pull the business from an incompetent provider and put it with a competent one.
We did have backups of most of the elements in the sim, but as with any artistic work the elements are only part of the puzzle. The true creative work is in how the elements are combined, which we took an awful long time over at aesthetica.
Lee Oldrich
26 Mar 11 at 4:58 pm
there is no doubt you did not receive what you were promised but at the same time, and for me, i have to have my work in hand. it’s like Second Life – they don’t make backups for you and it would be a lot to expect that SL will always have mu sims for me as long as i pay. they could be sold, etc
at the end of the day, we are responsible for ourselves and Microsoft could collapse and yield my operating system useless and ICANN could fail and bring down the internet – those are out of my control
but i can have a backup of my region and test that it actually works by uploading it onto a stick installation of OpenSim
i can’t imagine the grief this caused you and i would have felt that i needed to do all that was possible to recover it, especially if i had promised
Ener Hax
27 Mar 11 at 11:03 am