Lindenlab offering VPS (Virtual Private Server)
closed
Fullperm Alpha
Lindenlab could enhance the Secondlife experience by offering Virtual Private Servers (VPS) directly through their platform with payment options available in USD or even L$.
Advantages:
- Simplified billing: Consolidate all costs into a single & convenient subscription bill
- Seamless integration: Access of your VPS through the Secondlife backend interface
- Preconfigured server images such as shoutcast servers for audio streaming, webserver with databases etc.
- Web hosting: Run web servers like wordpress with databases and host your own website for your SL brand or system.
- Ready-to-go bot servers by using Corrade etc.
By providing VPS services Lindenlab could significantly reduce the challenges faced by developers in Secondlife. This offering would streamline workflows allowing users to focus more on building and reducing the steps from LSL interacting with a VPS.
Developer, blogger, club manager, bot user and much more people could take advantage from this.
This could be realized together with an external VPS provider as partner and a great chance to improve the balance standing of LL.
I would like to pay for "Premium++" :)
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Spidey Linden
closed
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
Incoming suggestions are reviewed in the order they are received by a team of Lindens with diverse areas of expertise. We consider a number of factors: Is this change possible? Will it increase lag? Will it break existing content? Is it likely that the number of residents using this feature will justify the time to develop it? This wiki page further describes the reasoning we use: Feature Requests
This particular suggestion, unfortunately, cannot be tackled at this time. However, we regularly review previously deferred suggestions when circumstances change or resources become available.
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We can’t do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.
Moo Boo
Never gonna happen, LL is in enough controversy about SL as-is, by offering something as flexible as a VPS it'd just pile on the fuel for bigger fires - that and they're already overpaying for AWS hosting, so the prices these VPS'es would be available at would just not be able to compete with other services more established in this field.
For price comparison, you get 128MB of memory through the "experience" thing inworld, available for premium users paying $8.25/month..
Alternatively EDIS who's a very reputable international hosting company charges $8.49/month for 2048MB of memory and 20 gigs of space..
That's 16x the memory, and 150x the storage for roughly the same price.
Like Jeremy said, you'd be better off finding something on https://lowendbox.com for a dollar or two a month, or if you're looking for something more serious then check out https://www.webhostingtalk.com/
Kyrah Abattoir
LL doesn't run their own server farm anymore.
Jeremy Duport
It's not really plausible for LL to do this except by building a portal for AWS nano and micro instances with extra markup for the trouble (already not the price friendliest option), for the dubious benefit of being in the same AWS region. https://lowendbox.com/ is your friend, racknerd's San Jose listings (or anyone elses Cali DCs for that matter) if you want geolocality to SL.
Otoa Kiyori
Jeremy Duport Oh this is so nice! Thank you!
Jeremy Duport
Otoa Kiyori
Loved LEB for many years. It's sort of a curated front for LowEndTalk. Loads of bare metal and VPS deals to be had. The "$1 VPS" and "$2 VPS" categories on the front page are very impressive - I use them for microprojects and things all the time. The best companies on there compare very favorably against amazon, digitalocean, etc, especially if you want better per-cpu perf than some big epyc or xeon mush.
Bigger market members like OVH and especially hetzner can be preferable if you want consumer CPU performance for hosting a heavy project, but if all you need is shoutcast, teamspeak, http, etc - you can get away with something quite tiny and very inexpensive.
Otoa Kiyori
Jeremy Duport I just need something that can run simple python based logic and also connect between OAuth web services and my LSL objects (like to personal google calendar and things) I think there are ways but having one middle machine would help make this so much easier! (So thank you!)
Silverdown Seetan
There are plenty of vps service's out there that offer very cheap hosting. From $5 TO $8 for the lowest vps packages. I dont think it be profitable. Companies normally do things like this if its profitable.
Tenaar Feiri
I pay $10 a month for a fully configurable VPS with root access to the system, that I can do whatever I want with and has more than enough space for everything you could possibly need.
The workflow between them is already streamlined, you have easy marketplace integration and fully web server driven LSL programs.
I'd rather they put work into expanding the charger limit for SetText & give us more customisation for it, add more character sets to object names, improve object rez performance, index object inventories so it's not hellish to work with large ones, get a move on with Lua integration, raise script memory limits, improve the in game script editor to be easier to use, etc etc.
Also longer audio files would be great.
LL VPS would be overpriced for what it is and give less control over the system, and probably not be as flexible as external providers.
What would help us the most, would be to get an actual scripting language in that isn't cobbled together with bits of string that can't be maintained because the grid relies on buggy script behaviour now and fixing it would break so much SL user content.
VriSeriphim Resident
Given that LL is a customer of AWS, it would be awkward (to say the least) for LL to offer VPS services other than as a reseller of AWS services.
Rather than that, I think would make more sense if they had a deal with AWS to offer a discount for SL residents (as long as LL was not subsidizing the cost, of course)
Beatrice Voxel
I could see LL acquiring a VPS service provider (like they did with Tillia for payments) and offering these services, sure. As long as they allowed the Resident access to the VPS as a user or power user (no admins, just let them manage their own apps and MAYBE do restarts, no OS configuration changes) so that LL could maintain control and oversight of the systems.
We would also need to know what services were legit LL concerns (marketplace, web profile, payment options, etc) and which were user-run.
Otherwise the scam artists currently throwing 'phishing' URL's into groups would have a very convenient umbrella to make their scams seem legit, since the links would go to the "Linden Labs" virtual server domain.
Tayln Osbourne
A Shoutcast VPS would be exceptionally popular among DJs, though you might seriously upset SL-based providers of Shout/Icecast.
Having a database server (beyond just 'kind-of-database' K-V Experience storage we get) would be highly useful, too.
Keep in mind though VPS management is a full time task to ensure reliable uptime, good customer service, and that the VPSes are secure. If a VPS could hold arbitrary data, this also means that LL would have to spend a lot of time auditing the contents of those VPSes for anything that violates the ToS, as they are public facing infrastructure.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it might be far too much commitment of resources and employees for Linden Labs to want to deploy.
Fullperm Alpha
Tayln Osbourne That is why i have mentioned doing that with experienced external partners :)