AviWorldz has officially joined the big grid migration of 2017, becoming the latest in a string of grids to switch to DigiWorldz hosting.
DigiWorldz is mostly known as a popular commercial OpenSim grid, but the company also provides hosting for other grids. This means that would-be grid owners can focus on building communities, and leave all the technical stuff to someone else.
Genesis Metaverse, one of the grids that emerged after the collapse of AviWorlds last summer, stopped running their own servers and switched to DigiWorldz earlier this month. Two other grids also affected by the AviWorlds collapse, Baller Nation and Kea Nation, have also made the switch.
AviWorlds owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business that the new grid should be up within the next couple of weeks.
The grid had gone down four days ago due to a power surge and wasn’t due to come back up until May. It had been run out of Pomposelli’s garage, an announcement that was met with a great deal of skepticism by the OpenSim community.
The business model of the grid will be changing as well, he said.
The previous business model — if you can call it that — was to give away 1,000 free regions to everyone.
Now, the grid will be a non-commercial, social grid. Users can connect regions that they run at home, on their own computers, and will still be able to get one free region on the grid.
“If they want more than the one free region we give them, then we will charge for it,” he added. “But there is no price range yet.”
He added that the grid will have an in-world currency, but the currency won’t be enabled on the self-hosted regions.
When users host regions at home they have access to the region database and all transactions that take place on that region, which raises potential security concerns.
The grid will be hypergrid-enabled, and will also have free uploads, free groups, and free classifieds.
Former residents who had free regions on the grid before it went down can move those regions over to the new grid, or ask for copies so that they can use them elsewhere.
“I have all the OARs stored in Avi-Labs Google Drive storage,” Pomposelli said.
He reiterated that the AviWorlds grid will continue to exist as a separate grid, and while it will use DigiWorldz for the hosting, it won’t be part of the DigiWorldz main grid.
“I have read what Butch [DigiWorldz founder Terry Ford] is offering and I was sold on it,” he said. “AviWorlds is a very busy grid and I need to have it in a place that will be cost-effective but also honest. This is a very important characteristic that I look for.”
Previously, Pomposelli has also experimented with getting hosting from Dreamland Metaverse and Zetamex Network. Both of those relationships ended when Pomposelli said he had problems with their services. Pomposelli had also had problems with a number of different business partners, employees, and, in the grid’s most recent incarnation, with the gods themselves.
This is AviWorlds’ tenth incarnation.
My previous warnings remain in place:
- Do not invest more time and money than you can afford to lose. Do not keep more currency in-world than you can afford to lose.
- Get regular backups of your builds.
- Do not use the AviWorlds avatar as your primary avatar. Set up an avatar on another grid and hypergrid in to AviWorlds instead. Users have routinely lost their avatars and inventories during previous grid closings.
- OpenSim user growth cools down with chilly weather - November 15, 2024
- Kitely adds PBR materials support, larger textures - November 8, 2024
- OSCC 2024 Submission Deadline Approaching - October 19, 2024