SkyLifeGrid founder Josh Boam agreed to provide hosting for the much-troubled AviWorlds grid last month. Now, the two grids are merging — and a third grid, QuickLifeGrid, is joining up as well.
As of last month, SkyLife had a little over 100 regions and 36 active users. I have no data on QuickLifeGrid. Its website now redirects to AviWorlds, and cached versions of the site from this summer don’t offer any size information.
The merger with QuickLifeGrid took place on Tuesday, AviWorlds owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business.
With the mergers, AviWorlds is now up to 84 regions — or around 180 standard region equivalents — with 142 active users the last 30 days.
The grid is running on four servers, said Pomposelli. Previously, the grid had run on hosting from Dreamland Metaverse, Zetamex and — for a brief period — on Kitely. Pomposelli had also tried, and failed, to run the grid on his own.
One problem is that AviWorlds is a large and busy grid.
AviWorlds, by comparison, often made it into the top 10 most popular grids list when it was up, reporting nearly 400 active users this past spring.
That could pose a challenge.
“I can confirm AviWorlds has a big following and I can see how it would be hard to keep up with it all,” SkyLife’s Boam told Hypergrid Business. “Let’s hope we can do what it takes to keep it around.”
Free land offer
To celebrate its latest reincarnation, AviWorlds is running a free land offer, with a quarter region and 3,750 prims for each resident.
The grid is also hypergrid-enabled, and has set up a hyperport with gates to other grids. Its address is  login.aviworlds.com:8002.
What keeps people coming back?
To say that AviWorlds has had a troubled history would be a massive understatement. The grid has experimented with a number of different business models, different business partners, different hosting providers, and has had some notable public relations disasters, but just keeps coming back.
Remarkably, so do its users.
“It’s like AviWorlds has some seductive drug,” said Boam.
“I do not understand why, to be honest. They just keep coming.”
He speculated that there might be something in the AviWorlds name or logo — or the fact that Pomposelli has some loyal and influential friends who are well known in the hypergrid community.
Boam said that he’s been happy working with Pomposelli so far.
“The man has some great ideas and in time we plan to implement as much as we can in the hopes that it will make AviWorlds a better place,” he said. “Lots of great things to come. I don’t see anything wrong with Alex and in fact I envy his enthusiasm.”
Boam added that he’s decided to merge most of SkyLife regions into AviWorlds.
“SkyLife will stay open, but with limited content,” he said. “We will be moving most of our content over.”
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