Featured News

As Oz recently discussed in a post, we are hard at work on uplifting Second Life to the cloud. It’s an incredibly exciting time, and we’re already seeing some significant improvements to Second Life as a service from this process. 

Additionally, many regions on the grid are now running on AWS simulators, with more being added every day!

In light of more regions being moved to the cloud, we are pleased to announce that we are ready to begin offering new private region purchases in limited quantities. As we continue to uplift more of the grid, more regions will become available over time, eventually leading to the Land Store being reopened. 

If you wish to purchase a private region, please submit a support ticket through our Support Portal. The ticket can be submitted under the Land & Region > Order Private Region category. Please include the region name, which must conform to region naming guidelines. Following your ticket submission, we will either process the region purchase, or add your request to a wait list, which will be handled in the order the submission is received. In the event that your request is put on the waiting list, we will not charge your account until the point when the region is delivered.

Private regions are charged an initial setup fee upon delivery, which also covers the first 30 days. Each month afterwards, private regions bill at their recurring monthly fee. 

Please note that there is a requirement to own at least one Full region to be eligible to own any Homestead regions.

Up to date information on private region pricing can be found here.

Information on private regions can be found here.
 

As the new year begins, we have some exciting news to share. The migration of Second Life to the cloud is now complete!

All the interconnected services and databases that collectively provide you with Second Life have been migrated to Amazon’s cloud servers. The "uplift" to the cloud will help bring better simulator performance and also improves our ability to diagnose problems and scale our systems for future growth and improvements. 

Here’s a peek at the former cage in our colocation facility that housed our servers since 2009,  now cleaned out and completely empty.

Many have asked us what happened to the “old” hardware that steadily served up Second Life for so many years. Most of it was too old to have any value and has been scrapped, but it is important to note that as part of our standard security protocols, all of the drives have been shredded and destroyed. Thanks for all the memories, old friends!

While the physical move is complete, there remain some optimization tweaks that we will continue to make to further improve performance over the coming weeks, and of course there are always bugs to hunt. We are truly grateful for your patience, especially during the final few weeks of 2020 as we worked furiously to finish the last parts of this migration.

OTHER COMPANY NEWS

Another noteworthy development for the new year is that Linden Lab has new owners! As announced in mid-2020, an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager signed an agreement to acquire the company subject to regulatory approval by financial regulators in the U.S. related to Tilia Inc.’s status as a licensed money transmitter as well as other customary closing conditions. We are pleased to share that the regulatory review has been completed and Linden Lab is now under new ownership. 

While the owners may be new, things are “business as usual” in Second Life. Last year saw strong growth for our virtual world and, as a result of this acquisition we expect even more resources in 2021 to further improve and grow Second Life in the future. 

Happy New Year!