The choice of OpenSim hosting companies has grown a bit but is still very limited, due to the fact that the OpenSim platform has only become stable — and grids hyperlinked — at the start of this year.
If you’re looking for a free alternative to a paid hosting services, see Free Land in OpenSim and OpenSim deployment gets easier.
If you want to outsource this function and save yourself time and worry, here are today’s top options, in no particular order:
ReactionGrid
Best for: Schools, businesses. ReactionGrid has a very strong educational community on it, and also offers a selection of tools and other products to assist groups in setting up their grids. The folks behind ReactionGrid work hard to maintain good relationships with their customers, and on ensuring the stability of the public and private grids they operate. Their customers rave about the service they get, and the ReactionGrid executives can usually be found on the grid itself, answering questions, solving problems, and running events.
Prices: Start at $25 per region (16 acres, average use) with a $25 setup fee.
Customers: ReactionGrid customers include big names like Intel, Microsoft, and the American Cancer Society.
Read more:
SimHost
Best for: Businesses and groups looking for the best performance. This is a project by Adam Frisby, one of the core developers of OpenSim and a vice president of OSGrid — however, the regions can be hosted on any open grid, or run as independent grids. Frisby has a great technical reputation with OpenSim, which is reflected in the high performance of their hosting. Customers who need more customization, can use Frisby’s company, DeepThink, for high-end custom development work.
Prices: Start at $45per region, with maximum of 40 simultaneous visitors.
PioneerX Estates
Best for: Individuals, small businesses. Simon Guttridge, who runs PioneerX, is based in the UK, but also has U.S.-based servers available. He gets glowing reviews from his customers. His servers were hit hard last summer by a hacker who wiped out hundreds of thousands of websites, and hundreds of OpenSim regions, but has since recovered from that disaster.
Prices: Start at $16 per region. Free single-acre lots also available for homesteaders and small businesses.
Customers: Pineapple Pictures, dozens of individuals.
Read more:
Media Dialog
Best for: Businesses in Germany
Prices: Start at $33 a month per region, $390 setup fee.
Customers: No referenceable customers yet.
Read more:
Grid4Us
Best for: Individuals, small businesses in Germany and vicinity.
Prices: Start at approximately $50 a month per region, $130 setup fee, on the Grid4Us grid.
Customers: Folk Cafe, though they have since moved back to Second Life.
Read more:
WorldSimTerra
Best for: Individuals, schools, small businesses, especially for those working in Spanish or Portueguese.
Prices: Start at $25 per region on the WorldSimTerra grid.
Customers: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, CentralSL, WebEducativa
Segarra Estates
Best for: Groups looking for private grids of at least four regions each.
Prices: Start at $135 per four-region grid, with a $200 setup fee. High-use grids and hypergrid connections cost extra.
DeepThink
Best for: Businesses needing custom programming or design, or for large-scale events.
Prices: Based on scope of project.
Read more:
- Shanghai’s DeepThink shifts to OpenSim development
- Adam Frisby’s Blog
- Individual grids, merchants determine OpenSim payments
- Do you need a virtual world?
- OpenSim developer: Second Life will survive as a virtual world
- OpenSim reaches 95% compatibility with Second Life
- Adam Frisby and Other Devs Discuss OpenSim Scalability
Sim-OnDemand
Best for: Organizations needing a region for a short period of time as the region is hosted on Amazon’s cloud server.
Prices: Starting at $7 per region for a region used less than 10 hours a month, running around $100 a month for a region of average use.
Customers: Referenceable customers not available.
Read more:
IBM Lotus Sametime 3D
Best for: Large organizations needing integration with other Lotus products and corporate LDAP directories.
Prices: Starting at $50,000 for four regions.
Customers: Manpower, Northeastern University, Northcentral Technical College, and Raytheon.
Did we miss anybody? Please let us know in the comments below.
Popularity: 74% [?]
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2 Comments
nice list and well written (as always) =)
i can’t say enough good about how wonderful Reaction Grid has been! the people – Kyle, Robin and Chris are incredible and then add wonderful people like Jeff Lowe and WOW!
nice to see real alternatives to SL. our subQuark is absolutely sold on Reaction Grid being a better tool for eLearning than SL is
thank you for a nice list, i love reading this type of thing =)
Definitively one of the hosting provider with the longest OpenSim hosting experience is missing: Dreamland Metaverse
We offer high quality regions in OSGrid. Our goal is to provide our residents a good service for a fair price. The monthly rents start at US$ 30 for low traffic and US$ 45 for medium traffic regions.
Since over a year our regions in OSGrid are known for their high reliability, using the latest stable OpenSim versions. Our good references show, that we are able to maintain high service quality, although OpenSim is still under development.
Many OSGrid residents have chosen our regions (like our shopping mall regions Samsara and Snoopies) as their login locations, because, as they told us, our regions run more reliably than the main OSGrid plazas.
We use high performance servers with powerful Intel quadcore processors and enough memory and bandwidth to allow our customers to experience OSGrid as lag free as possible. Even people that like to build intensively or that like to invite many friends to their place do not have to fear to end up in a slow motion scenery.
If you are interested, you can order a region on our web site. We are happy to answer any questions.
Dreamland Metaverse
Snoopy Pfeffer
snoopy.pfeffer@yahoo.com
metaverse.getmyip.com
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[...] from their family computers, or setting up small hosting companies to run worlds for others. Prices for renting an entire OpenSim region from a hosting company start at just $16 a month — in line with early Website hosting costs. Meanwhile, the OpenSim worlds are seen by some as [...]
[...] One major reason? The cost. Prices for a region start at zero if you’re hosting it at home, or $16 a month if you’re paying for professional hosting. [...]
[...] Pricex start at zero — the server software is a free download. Professionally hosted regions start at $16 a month. On the high end, IBM’s Lotus Sametime 3D product is $50,000 for four simultaneous regions [...]
[...] automated region launcher and host it on your own computer, or you can use one of many third-party vendors to run your region for [...]